- 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 mass school closures
and obviously Khan Academy, we're a not-for-profit
with a mission of providing a free world class education
for anyone, anywhere.
And we realized that as the schools were closing,
we wanted to put our resources together
so they could be as useful as possible
for you, the student, the teacher, the parent.
And we also wanted to provide more supports
especially since all of us are now socially distanced,
so that we can feel connected,
so that we could answer each other's questions,
so that we can support each other.
And so 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
a 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 2.5X, 3X
of what it typically is
and so our costs have gone more
and we wanna provide more supports.
So if you are in a position to do so,
please think about donating to Khan Academy.
I do wanna 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's many other long-time supporters
but we still need more help.
We're still digging into our reserves
in order to stay operational.
So now that I've given you my plug,
I wanna 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 language?
And so I have today, Luis von Ahn,
a old friend of mine who is the founder, 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, you're more qualified than I am.
Tell me about what y'all do at Duolingo.
- Well thank you for having me, Sal.
And thank you for this initiative.
It's great that you guys are doing it.
Well at Duolingo, I mean, we teach languages,
that's the main thing we do.
You can either do it online in 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.
And 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.
- And I can see,
we're seeing some screenshots now from Duolingo.
And Luis, I guess, how were people using Duolingo before?
Was it being integrated with your kind of traditional
you know, high school classes in languages
or is it mainly adults who are trying to learn maybe
for a business trip?
And how are you seeing the usage change
since the crisis began?
- Yeah, I mean, we have a ton of users.
I mean, we have over 300 million users worldwide.
It's all over the place.
The age range is from you know, six, seven, eight years old
to 90 some years old.
There's, as far as we know, we don't know for a fact
because we don't really track this,
anybody can really use Duolingo, but as far as we know
about 25% of our language classrooms in the U.S.
Use 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 you know,
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 20% of our users are in the United States.
And 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.
And it depends on the country.
In some countries it has more than doubled,
in some countries it has gone up by 50%, it kinda 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's remained like that.
So you know, I don't know what that means.
A lot of China's back to normal or mostly normal
yet our traffic remains essentially twice
what it was before.
- And 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 is there other motivations?
- I think there's both.
I think there's a lot of kids who had to be in school
and now are home and they're trying to figure out how to
you know, how to learn whatever they used to be learning
and a lot of teachers are telling them to use Duolingo.
But there's also people who are just bored at home
and you know, it used to be the case that they used to go
to a restaurant, now that time is being occupied
for something else.
And they think that you know, 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.
From English, you can learn about 35 languages on Duolingo.
But some of the smaller ones, you can learn High Valyrian
from Game of Thrones, you can learn you know, Esperanto.
You can learn a lot of kind of some of the smaller languages
but not too many people are learning those
compared to Spanish for example.
- Is High Valyrian a fully, fleshed out language
that like we could have a rich conversation in?
- I think so.
I think there's a lot of strange things, I think it has
a lot of different words for things like "sword"
or stuff like that.
- Yes, as we know Eskimos have six words for ice so I guess.
- Let me tell you something else which I don't know
what this says about the world.
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
or Scottish which, yeah, I don't know what this says
about the world but that was the case.
- Fascinating, fascinating.
And what's your sense?
So now there's a lot of parents and adults who you know,
I have always had aspirations to get better
at certain languages or learn certain languages.
What's your general advice there?
I guess this advice would carry over even if we weren't
in this crisis situation.
Where do you think Duolingo's 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?
- Yeah, I mean I think, well the first thing to know
about learning a language is it takes a while you know?
There's a lot of you know, kind 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 wanna get very advanced
in a language, it takes years.
So the first thing I think you gotta do is build a habit
as with most everything else.
So if you build a habit you know, spend 15, 20 minutes a day
using Duolingo and you do it over a long period of time,
you get quite good at it.
You know, 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 you know, 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 won't pay attention.
But if you watch with the subtitles in Spanish too,
I think that's a pretty good way to get much better at
you know, after you do Duolingo.
But you can't quite start by doing that
because it's pretty hard to understand the things.
- Yeah, and I remember that I used to watch
these Spanish dramas when I was trying to learn Spanish.
It is effective.
And you've touched on some questions
you know, from Instagram.
Sanoff_7 asks, "How do you establish a habit
"of learning everyday?"
You just mentioned the importance of habit.
What do you recommend for people who are trying that?
- Yeah, well one of the important things, I think,
is to do it everyday 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.
Kinda the first thing I do is do my Duolingo.
If you pair it with something else, it's like, "Well,
"I'll do it right after I brush my teeth," or "I'll do it
"right after lunch," and do it at the same time everyday,
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.
So you just gotta try to stick to it for about 20 days.
- I see, and we have some questions for you in particular
you know, from YouTube.
Reverend Hogwash is asking, "How many languages
"does Luis speak?"
And 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?
- Okay, I will say I am relatively good at English,
I am relatively good at Spanish, about the same,
English and Spanish.
I'm pretty good at Portuguese,
not quite as good as English but almost,
and then I am intermediate beginner in French.
The pronunciation is my nemesis for French.
- And what are you trying to learn right now?
You mentioned you still have a habit of--
- French, I'm doing French, that's the one.
I started about a few months ago, I started with French
after I learned Portuguese, I started with French
a few months ago.
- Fascinating, and people are asking, several folks,
this one's from Instagram.
BakerGirl325 asked, "Why did you create Duolingo?
- Yeah, 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 cofounder.
His name is Severin and his last name is Hacker by the way
which is 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, that's something you know about Sal.
In particular for us, neither of us is 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,
come to college, etc.
And we knew that in most countries in the world,
non-English speaking countries of the world,
knowledge of English can increase your income potential
by sometimes as much as 100%.
So you can basically double your income if you know English.
So we knew that but at the same time also, the ways
to learn languages were pretty expensive at the time.
So what we wanted to do was 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.
- And you mentioned you're free and you know,
this is something we have in common.
We have slightly different models,
we're philanthropically funded,
but it is an interesting question.
I think a couple people are referring to it.
So how do y'all exist?
How do you make money if you're giving it away for free?
- Yeah, our mission was always for anybody to be able
to learn a language entirely free on Duolingo.
And you know, the question is,
"How are we gonna make money?"
What we decided to do is kinda this double thing
that is similar to example of how Spotify makes money.
You can fully learn a language in Duolingo
but after every lesson, you have to watch a very short ad.
And that's you know, usually just a static image,
sometimes about you know, 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 wanna watch the ads, you can also pay
to subscribe to Duolingo and that turns off the ads.
So it's one of those two ways.
Only 3% of our users pay us to turn off the ads.
The other 97% are using it entirely for free.
- Yeah and you know, this is an important thing to bring up
'cause whether you run as a not-for-profit or a for profit
there's some way.
A lot of folks I think imagine Khan Academy still Sal
in a closet someplace or they imagine Luis
and your cofounder Severin Hacker
which is an incredible name to start a company with
but 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 if 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
"if you stutter more in English?"
I don't know if this is something that y'all even address
or do you have a point of view on this Luis?
- 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 good ideas Sal, let me know.
- 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
in my first job, this was at Oracle,
I was a product manager, and I had to go to this training
on public speaking.
And what they did is they video tapped 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."
And 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 it's own version of "um."
- Not only that, so before this I was a professor
in computer science and on my first year, somebody told me
that I should video tape myself in every lecture
and then watch myself.
First of all, it was extremely painful and secondly
you know, 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.
And that was pretty bad.
And I think that actually helped.
- For sure, for sure and it is a painful experience.
I try not to even watch these live streams afterwards
as you can imagine.
So 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?
- Well, keep at it.
Like I said, it takes a while to become fluent
in a language.
And 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 you know, I will say something
that I said before in this.
I would try starting watching some Netflix shows in Spanish.
There's some really good ones.
I particularly like The Money Heist but there are others.
And watch it and if it's too hard for you,
try maybe children's shows in Spanish,
they're a little easier.
And also try turning on the subtitling in Spanish.
That should help.
- Yep, and what is your view, for someone who wants
to become fluent, what's your sense of immersion
or some 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 role does that play?
- All of that helps.
There's a problem with it, it is 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, 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.
- Cool, so if you can obviously 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 of--
I don't know their names but there's ways that you can
get connected with folks and you know, talk to live people
in the other languages.
So it's interesting.
So this is a question I guess for both of us
from Instagram, Manfree.ganmore asks, "Does the speed
"at which you learn affect the retention of knowledge
"for language or math?"
So you can take the language side, or if you have
a point of view on the math side.
Do you think that certain people are better
at languages than others or do you think it's just
in our minds?
- You know, I do think there are certain people
who are a little better than others.
There's been research about that.
You know, some of it has to do with general intelligence
but actually, one of the biggest things is just being okay
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 helps you
learn languages faster is if you start speaking,
the sooner you start basically 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 like kinda vocalize
everything that you're seeing.
The sooner you start being able to talk to others,
the better you get.
And 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 you know, broken.
- What you're really saying is you know, 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, those folks
in general are gonna grow more versus the people
who are like, "Oh, I don't sound intelligent
"in this language yet, let me just kind of keep preparing."
- Yes.
- And I think the exact same thing is in math.
You know, I think people are quick to label themselves
or others are slow learners or fast learners.
You might see the kid in your class and she's always getting
the As 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, is the more associations you can make
with something, the more it'll be fluent to you,
the more it'll come to your--
You know, I'm not a expert at this but at least
I'm experienced in observing others.
And we've interfaced with a lot of the experts
on things like grit and growth mindset.
That really seems to be the best correlate.
- Totally agree.
- So let's see, from Instagram, SamI804 asks, "How can I
"make the process of learning a language fun?"
And I'm assuming above and beyond using the fun Duolingo.
Or how can I make using Duolingo even more fun?
- The main way is by using Duolingo.
I mean, we spend a lot of effort making Duolingo
as fun as possible.
There's a lot of features in Duolingo that make it more fun.
For example, we have these leader boards with leagues
where the idea is that whenever you join Duolingo,
you get grouped with about 50 other people who started
around the same time as you.
And 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 10 move on to the silver league,
then next week the top 10 move on to the gold league.
And 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 believe in is that
with Duolingo you can learn you know,
in two to three minute segments.
So anytime you basically, you 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.
- That's great.
And on Facebook, a question from Margo McGinness.
Oh hi Margo, I know Margo.
"My kids need to catch up with sixth grade Spanish
"for a new school over the summer starting
"from scratch, any tips?"
- Well, download Duolingo.
For sure download Duolingo.
You know, other tips of things that we hear
other than Duolingo and maybe watching some Netflix
in Spanish is 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
and 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.
And that helps you.
- Yeah, well one of my ideas just speaking generally
about learning languages, I have memories of you know,
my family's original tongue is Bangali but my mom also spoke
you know, Hindi/Urdu to some of her friends.
And you know, growing up in New Orleans,
there's no immersion for that.
But I would hear her conversations with her friends
and especially when she was saying something really juicy
that wasn't meant for my ears, it would be either
in Bengali, Hindi/Urdu and that's how I got my functional--
In your brain, it definitely picks up.
- A high reward to understanding.
You got to understand the juicy stuff.
- Right, right, you're brain wants to understand
what it's not allowed to understand.
But yeah, so yeah, I can 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
a school or obviously school's out, 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 math but obviously the same thing
can happen in Spanish or languages or other subjects.
So other questions here.
A few people are asking Luis,
"What was your original tongue?"
Spanish I'm assuming.
- I am a native Spanish speaker, yes.
- Where did you grow up?
- I grew up in Guatemala, yes right underneath Mexico,
that's where it is.
- And so these other languages that you've learned,
are learning, like Portuguese and French, this is just out
of interest or do you have a lot of friends who travel a lot
to those regions?
- It's out of interest.
I mean you know, I figured I should learn some languages
given that I am the CEO of Duolingo.
So yes, but it is out of interest in those languages.
- Right, well great.
Well, let's see, you've covered a lot of this.
Scott asks, "How many languages do you offer to learn?"
And I think you said, what was it 35?
- 35, from English, you can learn 35 languages.
- Yep, and here's a question from YouTube.
Nikhil Govender 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?
- Well, depends on what learning disability.
But I think we know of a lot of people who have all kinds
of different learning disabilities
who very successfully use Duolingo.
You know, we try to make the app as accessible as possible.
And yeah, 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.
- Yeah, we see a similar situation on the Khan Academy side
that we haven't done any focused 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 from certain students maybe
with ADHD or dyslexia or some place
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 you know, is true of both of our platforms
and other online platforms, that that sometimes
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 Khan Academy in other languages
but I always say, there's no need for us to do it
because there's Duolingo.
- Well thank you.
- So go to Duolingo and figure out--
So you know, keep doing the amazing work y'all do.
- No, and thank you.
And thank you for doing this and for all the amazing work.
We're huge fans of Khan Academy here.
- Likewise.
- Thank you.
- So everyone, there's a couple of other questions
that y'all are asking generally but I will just say
you know, we're doing this everyday
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 over today or over the next few days,
then I will try to answer them in future days.
But 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 things 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 can be creative at home
or what's the state of the economy?
I'll also put my plug in again, reminder that we are
a 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 y'all go.
Thank you for coming to the Homeroom live stream today.
I actually have my daughter with me, can I show you Diya?
She's right here, let me see if I can, there she is.
There she is, 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 live stream with me
but she didn't want to.
But I'll let y'all go and I'll see you tomorrow.
Stay safe, stay healthy.