Dr. Luis von Ahn (Duolingo) & Sal Khan share tips for effective digital learning | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our daily homeroom. For those of y'all who are new to this, this is something that we started doing a few weeks ago as we started seeing the math school closures.

Obviously, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. We realized that as the schools were closing, we wanted to put our resources together so that it could be as useful as possible for you: the student, the teacher, the parent. We also wanted to provide more support, especially since all of us are now socially distanced, so that we can feel connected, answer each other's questions, and support each other.

We've been running teacher webinars, parent webinars, and we have been doing this daily homeroom, which is just a way to connect, talk about whatever y'all have on your mind, and to have interesting guests. Now, before we get into the meat of the homeroom, so to speak, I will say what I always say: a reminder that we are not-for-profit. We are funded with philanthropic donations.

We were running at a deficit even before this COVID crisis hit, and now our traffic is about 2.5 to 3 times what it typically is, and so our costs have gone up. We want to provide more support, so if you are in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. I do want to give special thanks to several corporate partners who have stepped up in the last few weeks, really in record time, to help Khan Academy with this effort: Bank of America, Novartis, google.org, AT&T, and of course, there are many other longtime supporters. But we still need more help, we're still digging into our reserves in order to stay operational.

Now that I've given you my plug, I want to introduce our guest. You know, we've had a lot of questions about all things academic: how do we keep learning in math, how do we keep learning in the humanities, and how do you keep learning in foreign languages? So, I have today Luis von Ahn, an old friend of mine who is the founder and CEO of Duolingo. Many of y'all might be familiar; it's a place, it's an app where you can learn languages for free.

But, I don't know, Luis, maybe you're more qualified than I am. Tell me about what y'all do at Duolingo.

Luis von Ahn: Well, thank you for having me, Sal, and thank you for this initiative. It's great that you guys are doing it. Well, it doesn't mean we just teach languages; that's the main thing we do. You can either do it online on a computer at duolingo.com, or you can download an iPhone app or an Android app. It's free to learn, it's entirely free to learn, and you can learn as much as you want for free. The other thing is that we spend a lot of time making sure that it's fun to learn a language with Duolingo, so it feels a lot like you're playing a game when you're learning on Duolingo. We've worked really hard on that.

Sal Khan: What are you seeing in this? I guess, how are people using Duolingo? Before it was being integrated with your kind of traditional high school classes in languages. Was it mainly adults who were trying to learn maybe for a business trip? And then how are you seeing the usage change since the crisis began?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah, I mean, we have a ton of users. Well over 300 million users worldwide. It's all over the place; I mean, the age range is from, you know, six or seven years old to 90-some years old. As far as we know, we don't track this, but anybody really can use Duolingo. About 25 percent of language classrooms in the U.S. used Duolingo in one way or another. So we do have a lot of student users, but we also have a lot of adult users who are just wanting to improve on their high school French or something. Since everybody's been staying at home, we've seen our usage go up quite a bit, and you know, our user base is pretty global. Only about twenty percent of our users are in the United States.

One thing that's been interesting is pretty much every country, as soon as they apply their social distancing measures, we see traffic increase about one or two days after that. It depends on the country. In some countries, it has more than doubled, and in some countries, it has gone up by fifty percent. That kind of depends on the country. But we've seen that the first country, obviously, where we saw that was China about three months ago. Basically, the traffic in China doubled and it remained like that. So, you know, I don't know what that means; a lot of China's back to normal or mostly normal.

Our traffic remains essentially, you know, twice what it was before.

Sal Khan: What do you think is underlying that? Let's say China, for example. I am curious what language are folks learning. Is it all languages? Is it English? And then what do you think is the motivation? People are like, I'm home, I might as well do something productive? Or are there other motivations?

Luis von Ahn: I think the motivations are both. There are a lot of kids who had to be in school and now are home and they're trying to figure out how to learn whatever they used to be learning. A lot of teachers are telling them to use Duolingo. But there are also people who are just bored at home. You know, it used to be the case that they used to go to a restaurant, and now that time is being occupied for something else. They think that improving their lives is an important thing, so I think a lot of people are doing that.

In terms of what languages people are learning, it really depends on the country. In most non-English speaking countries, people are learning English. That's the main language that most everybody is learning. In the United States, the biggest language is Spanish, second is French, then German, then Japanese, and then it tapers off quite a bit. We do offer, from the U.S., you know, from English, you can learn about 35 languages on Duolingo. Some of the smaller ones, you can learn High Valyrian from Game of Thrones, you can learn Esperanto; you can learn a lot of kind of some of the smaller languages. But those are not too many people are learning compared to Spanish, for example.

Sal Khan: Is High Valyrian a fully fleshed-out language that we could have a rich conversation in?

Luis von Ahn: I think so. I think it has a lot of strange things. I think it has a lot of different words for things like "sword" and stuff like that.

Sal Khan: Yes, words for "I." Let me tell you something else, which I don't know what this says about the world, but during, you know, when the seasons were on for Game of Thrones, there were more people learning High Valyrian on Duolingo than there were people learning Irish, for example. I don't know what this is about the world, but that was the case.

Luis von Ahn: Fascinating.

Sal Khan: And what's your sense, you know? Now there are a lot of parents and adults who have always had aspirations to get better at certain languages, learn certain languages. What's your general advice there? I guess this advice would carry over if we weren't in this crisis situation. Where do you think Duolingo is really strong, and then what would you supplement that with if you really were trying to, you know, get conversational in Spanish or English or some other language?

Luis von Ahn: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to know about learning a language is that it takes a while. You know, there's a lot of fake news marketing out there that says you can get fluent in a language in nine days or whatever; this is just not true. It'll take years to get really fluent in a language. You can get a lot of progress in a few months, but if you really, really want to get very advanced in a language, it takes years.

So, the first thing I think you have to do is build a habit, as with most everything else. If you build a habit, you know, spend 15 to 20 minutes a day using Duolingo, and you do it over a long period of time, you get quite good at it. Things I would recommend: once you get to a point where you've done about half the Duolingo course or maybe a little more than that, I would recommend watching, you know, you can watch Netflix in Spanish or shows in other languages. I would recommend watching those. A lot of times, you can watch them with the subtitles. Now, try watching them with the subtitles in the language you're learning, not in English, because then you just want the attention. But if you watch with the subtitles in Spanish too, I think that's a pretty good way to get much better, you know, after you do Duolingo.

But, you know, you can't quite start by doing that because it's pretty hard to understand things.

Sal Khan: Yeah, and I remember that I used to watch these Spanish dramas when I was trying to learn Spanish. It is effective!

Luis von Ahn: Yes.

Sal Khan: You touched on some questions we were receiving from Instagram. Sanath underscore seven asks, "How do you establish a habit of learning every day?” You just mentioned the importance of habit. What do you recommend for people who are trying that?

Luis von Ahn: Well, one of the important things, I think, is to do it every day at the same time. That helps. If you just, for example, personally, the way I do it is basically as soon as I wake up, kind of the first thing I do is do my Duolingo. If you pair it with something else, like, "Well, I'll do it right after I brush my teeth," or, "I'll do it right after lunch," do it at the same time every day, that seems to really help.

Another thing is that it's the first maybe 20-ish days that really matter. I mean, we see it in our data. If we can get you to come back consistently for about 20 days, then you'll come back to Duolingo for very long periods of time.

Sal Khan: I have some questions for you in particular. From YouTube, Reverend Hogwash asks, "How many languages does Luis speak?" You just mentioned that you are still learning languages, so I'll extend that: not only how many do you speak, but what are you trying to learn right now?

Luis von Ahn: Okay. I will say I am relatively good at English. I am relatively good at Spanish, about the same as English. I'm pretty good at Portuguese; not quite as good as English but almost, and then I am an intermediate beginner in French. The pronunciation is my nemesis for French.

Sal Khan: And what are you trying to learn right now?

Luis von Ahn: I started with French. That's the one I started about a few months ago. I started with French after I learned Portuguese.

Sal Khan: Fascinating! People are asking a couple of questions. From Instagram, Baker Girl 325 asks, "Why did you create Duolingo?"

Luis von Ahn: Wow, that's a great question. You know, I started Duolingo; it wasn't just me. I mean, there’s a whole team of people that works on it, but at the beginning, there were two of us: me and my co-founder, his name is Severin, and his last name is Hacker, by the way, which is just crazy! But we started it, and the idea was that we wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everybody. I mean, it's something you know about, Sal, in particular. For us, we’re both neither from the U.S. We both had to learn English when we were growing up, and English has opened so many doors for us. I mean, we were able to come to the United States and come to college, etc. We knew that in most non-English speaking countries of the world, knowledge of English can increase your income potential by sometimes as much as a hundred percent. You can basically double your income if you know English.

So, we knew that, but at the same time, most of the ways there were to learn languages were pretty expensive at the time. So what we wanted to do was to make a way to learn languages that was going to be free, and in particular, we wanted to concentrate on English. It turns out that, you know, English is a big language for us, but now we've basically decided to teach pretty much every language. We're not there yet; there are 6,000 languages, and we only teach 35, but we're working on it.

Sal Khan: And you mentioned you're free, and this is something we have in common. We have, you know, slightly different models. We're philanthropic; we’re funded. But it is an interesting question, I think, a couple of people referring to it. So how do you all exist? How do you make money?

Luis von Ahn: My mission was always for anybody to be able to learn the language entirely for free on Duolingo. You know, the question is how are we going to make money? What we decided to do is kind of this double thing that is similar to how, for example, Spotify makes money. You can fully learn a language in Duolingo, but after every lesson, you have to watch a very short ad. That's usually just a static image; sometimes it's about a couple of seconds where you have to watch an ad. So basically, watch ads. That's one way we make money.

But if you don't want to watch the ads, you can also pay to subscribe to Duolingo that turns off the ads. So it's one of those two ways. And yeah, only three percent of our users pay us to turn off the ads; the other 97 percent are using it entirely for free.

Sal Khan: Yeah, this is an important thing to bring up because you have to figure, you know, whether your run is a not-for-profit or for-profit, there's some way.

Luis von Ahn: Yeah, you know, a lot of folks, I think, imagine Khan Academy still, Sal, in a class at some place, or where they imagine Luis and your co-founder Severin Hacker, which is an incredible name! I mean, to start a company with that you know, it’s just you. But these, you know, it costs a lot of resources, and so you have to figure out some way to make it work while still being true to your mission, which I think y'all are doing a great job.

So here's a question I don't know, this would fall under your domain, Luis, but maybe you have a point of view. I could try to attempt as well from YouTube. Ashutosh Tiwari, who's actually a regular question asker here, says, "Hello, Luis and Sal. How do I overcome stuttering?"

Luis von Ahn: If you stutter more in English, I don't know if this is something that you'll even address, or if you have a point of view on this.

Sal Khan: Luis, I can say it’s not something that we do with the app. I actually would not know how to overcome stuttering. I myself stutter a little bit, so if you have a good idea, let me know.

Luis von Ahn: Yeah, I’m not an expert in it either. I have been known to stutter every now and then. One thing that was interesting, and I don't know if this is related to stuttering, but I remember my first job. This was at Oracle; I was a product manager, and I had to go to this training on public speaking.

What they did is they videotaped you while you gave a speech, and then when you watched it, every time you said "um" in your speech, you also had to say "um," and everyone in the room said "um." That made me very conscientious of "um." I still say it, but you don't realize how much you say words like "um." And I know every language has its own version of "um."

Luis von Ahn: Not only that, I mean, before this, I was a professor in computer science, and in my first year, somebody told me that I should videotape myself in every lecture and then watch myself. First of all, it was extremely painful, and secondly, you start annotating things like, you know, how many times you say "um." For me, one of the bad things; I used the word "like" a lot. That was pretty bad, and I think that actually helped for sure.

Sal Khan: For sure! And it is a painful experience. I try not to even watch these livestreams afterwards.

From YouTube, The Disney and Travel Guy asks, "Any tips to learn Spanish? I'm trying to learn Spanish on Duolingo, and I really want to be fluent." So what should The Disney and Travel Guy do here, Luis?

Luis von Ahn: Well, keep at it. Like I said, it takes a while to become fluent in a language. I would say once you've gotten some of the basics, which you know, if you're maybe down to the middle of the Duolingo course, or three-quarters down the Duolingo course, I would try starting watching some Netflix shows in Spanish.

There are some really good ones; I particularly like "Money Heist," but there are others. And watch it, and if you can, if it's too hard for you, try maybe children's shows in Spanish. Children's shows in Spanish, they're a little easier, and also try turning on the subtitling, but this is probably in Spanish. That should help.

Sal Khan: And what do you say if someone wants to become fluent? What's your sense of immersion? Or some version, you know, if you can't travel to the country? Some version of immersion, like getting on video chats with folks or something like that? What is that?

Luis von Ahn: All of that helps. There's a problem with it. Most people have too much social anxiety to get on video chats with random strangers in a language that they're not very good at. So, you know, if you're able to overcome that, that's a pretty good solution. But I think a lot of people are just, it's just too much social pressure for them.

So in that case, you know, I don't think that's absolutely necessary. I think you can get pretty far by just using tools like Duolingo and, you know, watching TV shows and stuff like that.

Sal Khan: Cool! So if you can, obviously do Duolingo, the Netflix in Spanish or whatever, those are great things that anyone can do, like starting now.

And then, if you can overcome the social pressure, maybe get on some, I know there are—I don't even know their names—but there's ways that you can get connected with folks and talk to live people.

So, it's interesting. So, yeah, this is a question I guess for both of us from Instagram. Manfried.gonmore asks, "Does the speed at which you learn affect the retention of knowledge for language or math?"

So you could take the language side, or if you have a point of view on the math side. Do you think there are certain people who are better at languages than others, or do you think it's just in our minds?

Luis von Ahn: I do think there are certain people who are a little better than others. There's actually been research about that. Some of it has to do with general intelligence. But actually, one of the biggest things is just being okay with sounding not so smart. If you're okay with that, I think you're better at learning languages.

Because one of the biggest things that help you learn languages faster is if you start speaking. The sooner you start, basically, being able to vocalize and say stuff, the better. This is why with Duolingo, we recommend that whenever you're doing the Duolingo exercises, you just try to mouth them—just kind of vocalize everything that you're seeing. The sooner you start being able to talk to others, the better you get.

So, one of the ways in which some people are better at learning languages is they just basically don't care as much about sounding broken.

Sal Khan: And that's so true! What you're really saying is, we talk a lot about things like mindset and growth mindset here at Khan Academy, and you're really making the same point that people who are more comfortable putting themselves out there, they're not afraid to fail, that those folks in general are going to grow more.

Luis von Ahn: Just like the people who are like, "Oh, I don't sound intelligent in this language yet," let me just kind of keep preparing, their preparations.

Sal Khan: And I think the exact same thing is in math. You know, I think people are quick to label themselves or others as slow learners or fast learners. You might see the kid in your class, and she's always getting the A's, and you're always getting a few points less. Oh, maybe she's a fast learner. But the reality is she was probably the person who's always pushing, stepping out of her comfort zone, willing to get questions wrong. If she gets the question wrong, she'll reflect on it, and she's always trying to draw connections between things.

I think probably the same thing is true in languages as in math. The more associations you can make with something, the more fluent it'll be to you, the more it'll come to you. You know, I'm not an expert at this, but at least from my experience and observing others, and we've interfaced with a lot of experts on, you know, things like grit and growth mindset, that really seems to be the best correlation.

Luis von Ahn: So let's see if you agree.

From Instagram, Sam I 804 asks, "How can I make the process of learning a language fun?" And I'm assuming above and beyond using the fun Duolingo or our even more fun!

Luis von Ahn: The main way is by using Duolingo. I mean, we spend a lot of effort making Duolingo as fun as possible. There are a lot of features in Duolingo that make it more fun. For example, we have these leaderboards with leagues where the idea is that whenever you join Duolingo, you get paired with, you know, it's not paired, you get grouped with about 50 other people who started around the same time as you.

For the next week, you get to see who gets more experience points, and the top 10 people in that group of 50 move on to the next league. So everybody starts in the Bronze League, then the top ten move on to the Silver League, then next week, the top ten move on to the Gold League, and then we have a bunch of leagues like that. So that competition actually makes the app significantly more fun, so I think that's one thing.

Another thing that we really, really believe in is that with Duolingo, you can learn in two to three-minute segments. So anytime you basically are waiting for something for two minutes or something, you can just get in a little bit of Duolingo, and I think that's another way. If you just parse it out into smaller chunks, that helps!

Sal Khan: That's great!

And on Facebook, a question from Margo McGinnis. Oh hi, Margo! I know Margo. She says, "My kids need to catch up with sixth grade Spanish for a new school over the summer, starting from scratch. Any tips?"

Luis von Ahn: Well, download Duolingo! I would say try to get them, you know, other tips. The things that we hear other than Duolingo and maybe watching some Netflix in Spanish is to try reading the news in Spanish.

There's also some podcasts, by the way, we have a podcast; there's the Duolingo Spanish podcast, but there's others. You can try to listen to some podcasts. Some of them are pretty fun. The Duolingo, in particular, one, the Duolingo podcast is basically real stories of people from Latin America about stuff, you know, like soccer players and stuff like that that are in very slow Spanish. That helps you.

Sal Khan: Yeah, one of my ideas, just speaking generally about learning languages, I have memories of, you know, my family's original tongue is Bengali, but my mom also spoke, you know, Hindi, and due to some of our friends. Growing up in New Orleans, there's no immersion for that, but I would hear her conversations with her friends, especially when she was saying something really juicy that wasn’t meant for my ears.

It would be either in Bengali, Hindi, or Urdu, and that's how I got my functional brain language skills.

Luis von Ahn: Definitely things you understand through understanding!

Sal Khan: Right, right! Your brain wants to understand what it's not allowed to understand.

Luis von Ahn: But, yeah, so I could imagine, actually, Margo's situation. A lot of parents are trying to figure out, you know, it might be a situation like that, that you're transitioning in school or obviously school's out.

Can we, can you leverage? You know, we've been advocating how you can use the remainder of the school year and even the summer to keep learning in Spanish. I started in math, but obviously the same thing can happen in Spanish or languages or other subjects.

So, other questions here. A few people are asking you, Luis, what was your original tongue? Spanish, I'm assuming?

Luis von Ahn: I am a native Spanish speaker, yes.

Sal Khan: Where did you grow up?

Luis von Ahn: I grew up in Guatemala.

Sal Khan: Yes, right underneath Mexico. That's where it is. And so these other languages that you've learned or learning, like Portuguese and French, this is just out of interest, or do you have a lot of friends? Do you travel a lot to those regions?

Luis von Ahn: It's out of interest. I mean, I figured I should learn some languages given that I am the CEO of Duolingo. So yes, it is out of interest in those languages!

Sal Khan: Great! Well, I think we've covered a lot of this. God asks, "How many languages do you offer to learn?" I think it was 35, right?

Luis von Ahn: Yes, yes! 35 from English into 135 languages.

Sal Khan: And here's a question from YouTube. Nikhil Govindar asks, "If someone has a learning disability, they're asking both Khan Academy and Duolingo how it's suited to help. Any thoughts there, Luis?"

Luis von Ahn: It depends on what learning disability, but I think we know a lot of people who have all kinds of different learning disabilities, who very successfully use Duolingo. We know we try to make the app as accessible as possible, and yeah, we know, for example, we know a lot of people with dyslexia that successfully use Duolingo. You can turn off certain exercise types, and that seems to help.

So, depending on the learning disability, I think it can work pretty well.

Sal Khan: Yeah, we see a similar situation on the Khan Academy side. We haven't done any focus studies for many learning disabilities, but to your point, we're trying to make it as accessible as possible.

And then, we've anecdotally heard for certain students, maybe with ADHD or dyslexia, or someplace on the Asperger's spectrum, in certain cases, you know, being able to work at your own pace, slow down things, speed things up, get immediate feedback on exercises, things like that, which is, you know, true of both of our platforms and other online platforms.

Sometimes, that can be helpful, but I think there's probably a lot more research to be had.

Well, Luis, thanks for joining us and answering these questions about language. I think this is an area where, you know, Khan Academy, I get a lot of questions: when is Khan Academy going to teach language? And, you know, we have kind of ketamine in other languages, but I always say there's no need for us to do it; there's Duolingo. So you gotta do Duolingo and figure that out!

Luis von Ahn: Thank you for doing this and for all the amazing work. We're huge fans of Khan Academy here.

Sal Khan: Likewise, thank you. So everyone, that's, I think there's a couple of other questions that y'all are asking generally, but I will say, you know, we're doing this every day, and I think we're coming up to the half hour.

But, you know, keep your questions going. If I can't get them in today, over the next few days, I will try to answer them in future days.

As I mentioned, this is just a forum for all of us to stay in touch, stay connected during the school closures, talk about things that might be relevant for getting you through the school closures, or that might just be interesting since we're all socially distanced now.

Expect over the next few weeks we will have many other interesting guests like Luis to talk about anything from how you might try to tackle a certain subject, how you might try to stay just happy and content in this otherwise stressful period, or things about how you'd be creative at home or what's the state of the economy.

I'll also put my plug in again: reminder that we are not-for-profit. If you are in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. We are running at a deficit, especially given all of the traffic and the use of the resources because of this crisis.

So, I'll let you all go. Thank you for coming to the homeroom livestream today. I actually have my daughter with me; she didn’t want to—she said, "Can I show you the?"—she's right here.

Let me see if I can—she's ignoring me. What? No, she’s got headphones on, but yeah, she was my special guest. I wanted her to be in the livestream with me, but she didn't want to.

But I'll let you all go, and I'll see you tomorrow. Stay healthy!