Duolingo.
Is Duolingo a gateway to comprehensible input?
What do I think of Duolingo as a way to get into language learning?
Well, Duolingo is without a doubt the most successful language learning app ever.
It's got like 135 million users.
They are extremely successful.
Far and away the most successful language learning app in the world ever in terms of people using it,
number of people using it.
And when I think of Duolingo, I think of the expression that we find in many languages,
which is that the first step in any endeavor,
in any activity is sort of the job half done, or you have to get started somewhere.
And there's no question that Duolingo starts you off.
A lot of people who would otherwise never try to learn a language have gotten onto Duolingo.
And I always say, I have always said, you never know what will lead to what.
And so in the example of Duolingo, the whole project apparently started in 2009 when a person named Luis von Ahn,
who was involved in developing that gotcha thing that you have to find
when you 're confirming who you are signing up at some website.
The same Louis von An came up with a scheme whereby people would translate things back and forth
and somehow this would provide language learning content.
I don't know the details of that, but that was the beginning, but it didn't really work.