Duolingo Timeline

Hello!

I did some forum digging (while I still can) to list the important announcements that we saw in the last 10 years.

So it is a timeline of changes on Duolingo. Inspired by the "Duolingo turns 2 years old" post https://archive.ph/5ZY1E which was actually almost 8 years ago...

Duolingo launched its private beta on 30 November 2011.

2011: a TED talk by Luis,   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8  posted on Youtube on 2011-12-06

2012 June 19:   the "birthday" of Duo:  Duolingo (website version) is available for everyone. Teaching Spanish, German, French (from English), and English for Spanish speakers

2012 Oct - Nov:  EN-IT, IT-EN, EN-PT, PT-EN courses added (in beta)

2012-11-13  Duolingo launches iPhone App

2013-05-07  English for French speakers added

2013-10-09  Duolingo launches the Incubator https://archive.ph/MpUQV

2013-11-13   English for German speakers released: the first language made in the Incubator by Duolingo staff   https://archive.ph/2nlY7

2013 Nov.   Duo the owl gets a new design  https://blog.duolingo.com/reshaping-duo/

2013-12-19   the first incubated course created by volunteers:  English for Russian speakers  https://archive.fo/A85OH

2013 Dec:  English from Dutch, English from Turkish released in beta

2014 March  English from Japanese  https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/2069851
https://archive.ph/MPuWV

2014-06-19  Duo turns two years old, with 30 million users
https://magyarbagoly.blogspot.com/2022/02/duolingo-turns-two-today.html
https://archive.ph/5ZY1E

2014-12-13  Strength bar    https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/5780970  
https://archive.ph/4pE8P

2014: 26 new courses entered beta in 2014, for example English from Hungarian  https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Course_list

2015-01-08 Duolingo for Schools started https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/6318291 https://archive.ph/VcZQ9

2016-05-22  State of Monetization at Duolingo  1
https://duolingo.hobune.stream/comment/15695026

[#DuolingoForumGems originally posted on 2014-06-19 on the Duolingo in English forum by Luis

This post is interesting as a slice of Duolingo history.] https://archive.ph/5ZY1E

Duolingo turns two today!

We launched the Duolingo website two years ago at 10:08am EST. It was supposed to be at 10:00am -- lots of people were waiting -- but Tony, Vicki and Severin were still making last minute changes. And then Ryan wanted to change the background color of the whole site. But in the end it worked out, and we were only 8 minutes late :) We couldn't believe we had a whopping 17,000 users that first day.

A lot has happened since then:

[#DuolingoForumGems originally posted on 2014-07-15 on the Duolingo in English forum by AureliaUK 

This post is interesting as a slice of Duolingo history, obviously, the situation changed since then :) ] 

Hungarian for English - suddenly at 76% ???

Is this real or a glitch in the system? Just to clarify, it was showing 20.7% as at midnight.

http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/hu/en/status

comments:

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sommerliedPLUS

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They deleted a lot of the standard words/skills. Therefore the percentage is totally incorrect, a realistic value is probably still somewhere around 20%.

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VÁLASZBEJELENTÉS.TÖRLÉSLINGOT ÁTADÁSA•7 ÉVE

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AureliaUK

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OK, thanks. I wondered if it was a gremlin caused by the crash earlier today.

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VÁLASZBEJELENTÉS.TÖRLÉSLINGOT ÁTADÁSA•7 ÉVE

comment by blazmah: 

We saw this coming, haha.

Just like sommerlied said, we deleted all the standard skills, which decreased the total number of words in our course. The percentage, currently, is calculated by dividing the number of completed words with all words, thus the 76%.

You ask why? Well, we actually asked ourselves: why not? We are building the course from scratch, and never ever used any of the built-in standard skills.

Furthermore, while the original courses have around 1800-2000 words we don't know exactly how many words we will have, and expect about 4000 words. Thus we've had few options:

1) We gradually delete standard skills (that's what we've been doing until this very moment; it would have caused constant growth of our course, but in the end we would move around 85-95% for weeks)

2) Delete all built-in skills. (this would cause a huge increase in percentage, then it would cause stagnation)

3) Add all words without deleting any skills. (this would cause a huge drop in percentage, and continuous stagnation)

We chose the second option. The way Duolingo calculates percentages is clearly a bad one, our act is the perfect way to prove that. For that we wouldn't like to rely on the current system as it is clearly faulty.

Where are we then? About 11-12 percent of our course has been done. From now on forward, the best option is to self-report the progress. We follow a professional book and build our course basing it on that book and its content. Thus our course will be extremely different and much longer than the "usual" Duolingo ones.

As for what solutions we recommend instead of the current system: well 1) we could report our progress ourselves weekly, not letting the computer to do so, or 2) set up a "goal" number of words instead of an ever changing one, and calculate percentages to that one.

The story of the Duolingo Hungarian course

 

The Hungarian course was created by a group of volunteer contributors. You might have heard about the Duolingo Incubator, where people were able to apply to help creating courses for the language-pairs they already speak. 

When the Incubator was created (9th of October 2013), first only courses teaching English/Spanish/French/German/Italian/Portuguese were possible. The so-called "big six".

A group of Hungarians applied to create the "English for Hungarian speakers" course. Abenhakan, Nitram, Boringtomi, SzeAndr, Adam1978, and a few other people...  I don't know the whole team, I was not there :P

This team translated a given English language template to Hungarian (and also the interface!)  They started on 2013-11-15 and entered Beta on 2014-01-08  (that is surprisingly quick, only 54 days! ) and the course graduated from Beta on 2014-12-10.