Duolingo gives language learning a jump start

Jim Giles, consultant

(Image: Westend61/Getty)

Luis von Ahn is an ambitious guy. He's best known for putting a twist on CAPTCHAs - the squiggly fragments of text that websites deploy to beat spammers' automated software - that he called reCAPTCHA. Von Ahn realised that when we solve a CAPTCHA we could be helping to decipher text that book-digitisation software has tried and failed to transcribe. Google liked the idea so much that it bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and now uses the technique to help power its book-scanning project.

Von Ahn's current project may be his most ambitious yet. Duolingo is a website where people can learn a language for free and help to translate web content at the same time. Not everyone thinks it will work, but von Ahn now has evidence that one part of the challenge - the learning bit - is performing as hoped.

To test the effectiveness of Duolingo, Roumen Vesselinov at the City University of New York used standard tests of language ability to assess the skills of just under 200 people who had learned Spanish on Duolingo for eight weeks. He found that students needed to spend an average of 34 hours to learn the material that is normally covered in the first semester of a university Spanish course.

(The study was funded by Duolingo, but Vesselinov, who worked on the study with John Grego at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, says that final report itself is "entirely ours".)

Is 34 hours fast or slow? Von Ahn, who is based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told The New York Times that at his university the same improvement might require 135 hours of course time. The comparison isn't quite fair, says Vesselinov, because it's not known whether students actually need to use all that course time in order to pass. But it at least suggests that students might save time by using Duolingo rather than conventional teaching.

And what of von Ahn's bigger aim: to use Duolingo to translate the web? The idea is take content that needs translating - say, a Wikipedia article - and use it as a translation exercise within Duolingo. By combining the efforts of many learners, von Ahn thinks he can match the quality of professional translators. Sadly he's remaining silent on that goal, at least for now. "We don't yet have any data to release about that," he wrote in an email, "other than to say it's going very well :)"

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/27e43f35/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A130C0A10Cduolingo0Elanguage0Elearning0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

david lee honduras prison fire do not call list sports illustrated westminster dog show 2012 words with friends words with friends