I remember hearing an academic rail and rant against Duolingo at a prominent global online learning conference a few year ago. What struck me was the negativit

I remember hearing an academic rail and rant against Duolingo at a prominent global online learning conference a few year ago. What struck me was the negativity in the face of a simple problem being solved - people want to learn to speak a language before they learn to read and write it for many valid reasons. Conversational fluency is a thing that has existed for a very long time. Duolingos superpower is that it can create beginners in languages new to them, at scale, something which most systems to date can’t do as well. It’s true a phone might not give you a full education, but we do search for plenty of things every day to learn to use knowledge. The esteemed academic did not present any alternatives to this desire among learners to start to learn a new language.. and instead went back to the theory of learning language through reading and writing first.