Duolingo just added 148 new courses in its biggest update ever – thanks to AI

The world’s most popular language-learning app is becoming a lot more multilingual.

For beginning-level speakers

In an announcement today, Duolingo said it is adding 148 new language courses, more than doubling the current number of offerings.

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Seven of the world’s most popular languages — Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin — are now available in the app’s 28 supported language interfaces.

In addition:

• Spanish and Portuguese speakers, Duolingo explains, now have access to learn Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin.
• Speakers of fifteen European languages, including French, German, Italian, and Spanish, can now learn Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin, as well as other top languages.
• Users who speak Asian languages such as Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Tagalog, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, and Tamil can now learn all of the top seven languages. Prior to this update, many of these speakers could only learn English.
• English speakers can learn two new languages: Swedish and Tamil (a language primarily spoken in India and Sri Lanka).

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The new courses are primarily for beginning-level speakers and include immersive stories and DuoRadio to help with comprehension. More advanced-level courses will be rolled out over the next few months.

‘AI-first’ strategy

This announcement comes just a day after the company said it was adopting an “AI-first” strategy and would replace many of its current human creators with AI. In a memo shared on LinkedIn, CEO Luis von Ahn said Duolingo will need “a massive amount of content” to teach effectively and that manual creation will no longer be enough.

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“Developing our first 100 courses,” von Ahn explained, “took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses.” Instead of taking years to build a single course with humans, the company now builds a base course and uses AI to quickly customize it for dozens of different languages.

Von Ahn added that the AI push wasn’t about replacing humans, but “removing bottlenecks” to do more with existing employees.

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