Duolingo will help you learn English and other languages in your local language

The latest version of the Duolingo app has been tailored for the Indian market. In most countries, the company just launches the app. They don't look in to how the people are using it. However, India is a big market with a unique demography and they decided to look into its usage and patterns.

So, India is the first market they have ever customized Duolingo for. India is the first market for the company where a dedicated team is at work for a specific market. This team looks in to how people use the app in India

Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn observed, “One of the stupid assumptions we made was that you don't need to learn English if your phone's language is English. In India, a lot of people have their phone set to English, but they don't know English well. We made the incorrect assumption, and didn't show English as a language to be learned. This has changed now.”

“Also, typing in Hindi is rare. People prefer not to type in Hindi, and in fact they prefer to type Hindi in Roman letters. We've removed the need to type in Hindi in the app”, he said.

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Duolingo has worked hard to make the bandwidth usage a lot smaller and drastically reduced the size of the app. The Android app, for example, used to be 20 MB, and it is now about 7MB. They are further reducing the bandwidth and space requirements of the app as now they are trying to reach phones with low memory, and users with poor internet bandwidth.

Content has been customized to make it more appealing to Hindi speakers. The app now has Indian names and characters.

Right now learning English from Hindi is possible and Duolingo plans to add more languages like Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, and Tamil. These should be coming within this year.

Based upon information from a news story published on Android Central, Read it here.

Image courtesy: Duolingo

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