Duocon - Duolingo's first conference

So I'm on my way home from London, after attending the world's first "DuoCon" event, a conference-cum-party-cum-meetup organised by everyone's favourite green owl and also language learning app, Duolingo. This blog post is a summary of my experience, what happened, and my summaries of all of the talks that were delivered at the conference as best as I can remember them. If you want to skip to the summaries of the talks, I’ve grouped them under headlines.

Duocon was the first event of its kind, organised by the Duolingo staff and a team of volunteers. There was a party on the Friday, and an all-day conference on the Saturday, consisting of talks from staff, volunteers and associates.

The Party

The main draw of this event, besides the fact that it was in my home country and therefore not ridiculously expensive to go to, was that it was also free. Oh, and David Peterson was slated to be there. And the promise of free food and cocktails helped in no small part.

Despite that, I went down not having a clue what to expect. I signed up as soon as I saw the event on the front page of the www.reddit.com/r/duolingo subreddit, and had a vague idea that I might be one of a dozen attendees, sitting in a circle and talking about how the Spanish learning is going.

Not so. I reached The Dirty Martini club - the location of the Friday party - and didn't have a hard time figuring out where Duocon was.

I had no trouble finding the event

And the mandatory owl picture.

I was greeted by friendly and enthusiastic staff, given a lanyard and headed down to a crowded bar full of people who had come for the same thing. And the party lived up to its promise. There were free cocktails - in the plural! I wouldn't have held it against them if I had to pay for the second, but I didn't even have to pay for the third - so much free food that I was threatening to burst before I made it back outside, a cocktail-making class where I learned how to combine delicious alcohol with more delicious alcohol (and rose petals,) and hype from Duolingo's very own founder, Luis Von Ahn. Plus, David Peterson was there!

My party photos were all a bit blurry. At least I don’t have to redact any faces.

The hype was accompanied by a team of volunteers and staff who all did a great job in making the guests feel welcome and accommodated. I came alone, and being a moderate intravert meant that it took a while to get to know people, but more than once members of the organising team came over to say hello, which was always welcome. I did break down my internal barriers, in any case, and met some interesting folk whom I knew I would see at the conference the next day. These included a lovely lady from France who was there to promote the word of Esperanto, a great guy from Twickenham who had also come alone and knew as little as me about what to expect from the weekend, a quaint couple from Australia who were Spanish teachers by profession, and did I mention David Peterson? I feel like I ought to mention him again.

The Conference

And that brings us to Saturday. I had mixed feelings about getting up early to be at a conference for 8.45, having reached my accommodation late the previous night after three cocktails, but it was the right call.

The conference - strange though this might sound - exceeded the party in value for me. There were nine talks by members of the Duolingo team and associates spaced throughout the day - dotted throughout was tea, coffee and snacks, a delicious lunch, a documentary film showing in another room, a photo-printing station which downloaded and printed any pictures you posted on Instagram with the #duocon hashtag (excellent marketing,) a videographer interviewing guests, and Duo the owl again. Plus plenty of time in between to mill around and get to know the other attendees, some of whom I'm met the previous night, and get an idea of what had brought other people there. And all of it was once again free - the overheads that must have gone into the catering, venue hires and everything else in order to do all this for over a hundred people for free, I couldn't imagine.

I attended all the talks, though you weren't obliged to if you wanted to go off and watch the Duolingo-produced documentary "Somewhere Like Home" in another room - alas, it'll have to wait for another day. The talks seemed more interesting for me! - so I'll try and summarise them as best as my memory and limited notes will allow.

The talks

• Talk 1 - Making Free Language Education a Reality (Luis von Ahn)
• Talk 2 - Learning Initiatives at Duolingo (Karin Tsai)
• Talk 3 - English Events amid Venezuela’s Toughest Crisis (Eskeiver Robles Laura)
• Talk 4 - Teaching and Learning the Duolingo way (Hope Wilson)
• Talk 5 - Shameless: A Tale of Linguistic Acceptance (Gabriela Talarico)
• Talk 6 - The Value of Language (David Peterson)
• Talk 7 - Re(Connect): Heritage Languages and the Internet (Noah Buffini Higgs)
• Talk 8 - Tools for Success: Supporting Course Creation at Scale (Jake Barnwell)
• Talk 9 - From Sentence to Session (Maggie Hewitt)

Talk 1 - Making Free Language Education a Reality 

First up was the hype-man himself, Luis Von Ahn, Duolingo CEO, talking about their mission and growth. I wasn't sure what to expect from the CEO of a language learning app, but Luis was friendly, down-to-earth, and engaging. I didn't see him again for the rest of the night, although I did wonder about who was in that owl costume …

He talked about how Duolingo began, and how it has developed and grown over the past seven years, of course, but the main focus of his talk was the mission statement of the company:democratising education, and making language learning accessible to everyone for free. That resonated with me. I was a late adopter of Duolingo - it's late 2019 and I'm two months in. I knew it existed and thought it was a cool idea, but didn't seriously give it a go until I realised I had run out of reasons not to start learning Spanish. So I gave it a go, and have had mixed opinions about the efficacy of the app's various features. But hearing the mission statement put so eloquently by Luis really put into perspective for me how important the core concept behind Duolingo is.

I take the best pictures. Luis is showing the proportions of users taking their courses. The most popular courses are English for Spanish speakers and Spanish for English speakers.

Talk 2 - Learning Initiatives at Duolingo

Next up was Karin Tsai, whom you might recognise if you’ve ever seen the April Fool’s Day video “Duolingo Push”. If not, go check it out.

Karin was the face of the excellent “Duolingo Push” viral video.

Her talk focused on some of the new concepts that are being developed for Duolingo, such as an increase in monolingual lesson content, the use of video lessons, extended audio dialogues, and the addition of "cracked skills", which is Duo's attempt to introduce a Spaced Repetition System of learning into their app, to encourage you to revisit content you may have forgotten. I've seen a lot of these updates on Reddit, but it’s encouraging to hear it from the creators and see where they want to take these features.

Some current or future developments she discussed: allowing for more creative production tasks, introducing some sort of navigation and guidance to help new users engage with the app, improving listening, speaking and pronunciation tasks, personalising learning to the user, and doing more to teach non-Latin scripts - which as a Japanese learner, was extremely welcome news! There’s a consensus among Duolingo as well that Japanese, Chinese and Korean need more work to teach how to write the characters. She also touched upon checkpoints in skill trees - these were developed as a way to test users’ proficiency in each aspect of the language, and find out what courses are teaching well or not so well.

Duolingo uses the checkpoint quizzes to work out how well you’ve learned (therefore how well they’ve taught) certain grammar points.

Karin also discussed the CEFR framework, and how Duo - initially created without much reference to frameworks of any kind - has been retrofitting its content to make it more CEFR friendly. So that now you can reasonably expect (in the most popular courses at least, a theme that was to be revisited,) to be starting your learning at A1 level, progressing to A2, and hopefully reaching B2 level once you finish a skill tree.

New iterations of skill trees are becoming aligned with the CEFR framework.

What was particularly interesting for me to learn was that Duo offers an English language certification, which costs $50 and can be completed online, as opposed to costing $250 and requiring you to travel to the nearest city some weeks in advance. The latter option of which may be out of the question for those who are poor and don't live in a city, and has arguably led to a massive inequality in education. Having an online test that can be sat in an hour seems like something that should be a non-starter these days - of course it would exist - but apparently it's a new idea, and the Duo certification is still in its infancy as an accreditation. It's not accepted at any UK university that I'm aware of at the moment, though apparently over 500 institutions have adopted it.

Another interesting point from Karin’s talk was about how small changes make a big difference for user experiences. They received complaints from users about how many translation test sentences show the first word of the sentence with a capital letter, making it apparently much easier to complete the task. So they tested removing this capital letter, to avoid giving an unnecessary hint. Consequently they saw a 0.5% decrease in user retention, from users who were given tasks with no capital letters. Just that one small change apparently increased the challenge for some users, who may have been demotivated to continue learning on the app, and so didn’t. Thus Duolingo still has capital letters in its typing tests. It was interesting to see the level of fine-tuning that goes into the UX, and how important those tiny details can be.

New question types Duolingo are testing out.

Talk 3 - English Events amid Venezuela’s Toughest Crisis

This talk was going to be delivered by one Global Ambassador, Eskeiver Robles from Venezuela, who was going to talk about how he was able to make a difference in his local community through the Duolingo Events program. Unfortunately, he was ill and unable to make it, so Laura (I don’t know her last name unfortunately,) took over the Events portion of the talk.

I wasn’t particularly aware that Duolingo Events existed, so it was really interesting for me to see how much of an impact they’ve made. I didn’t take great notes during this talk, but my main take-away was the fact that the program exists thanks to the work of Global Ambassadors around the world.

As you can see from the title, the talk was going to go into much more detail about the current economic crisis in Venezuela - it was a shame that it didn’t.

Duolingo Events is a powerful way to link communities.

Talk 4 - Teaching and Learning the Duolingo Way

Following a short break, Hope came up to talk about the Duolingo method of teaching. As a Linguistics graduate, this was particularly interesting to me. She talked about what it meant to "know" a language, and subsequently what "learning" a language entails. Ultimately, it comes down to achieving whatever skills that one wants to accomplish in their chosen language or languages. You're the app user, and the choice is in your hands. If you want to learn Korean to watch K-dramas, that's great. If you want to learn how to say hello in Arabic so you don't embarrass your Lebanese grandma, also great. If you're shooting for a job in Spain, go for it. It sounds self-evident, but I think it's a helpful concept to remind people of: there's no set way to learn a language, and success means something different to every individual learner. Duolingo, says Hope, hopes to facilitate that.

Also noteworthy was the discussion of the implicit learning methodology that Duo uses. You learn by example - working out the rules of the language through induction and testing hypotheses, rather than memorising a set of prescriptive grammar rules. At the same time, Duo does offer tips, which offer explicit guidance in grammar. But the fundamental learning model lets you make the connections yourself, and doesn't patronise you.

Lastly, she talked about ways that Duolingo increases motivation to learn, most of which will be obvious if you've used the app - points, bets, streaks, leagues, XP, achievements and so on. Boiled down, the talk was about why Duo does well at what it does.

Talk 5 - Shameless: A Tale of Linguistic Acceptance

This talk was my absolute favourite. Gabriela, from Brazil, talked about her experience of linguistic identity, and the difference between the way she constructed herself in English versus the way she constructed herself in Portugese. Her experience of coming to Harvard University and feeling on the backfoot as a second language speaker, like a different person.

It was a hard talk to describe, but it was powerful and compelling, hearing someone put their insecurities on stage and talk about a time when they struggled to be themselves. There were several key messages, but in particular there were a few quotes I really liked, such as “Embrace the imperfection”, “Expand our sense of home”, and my absolute favourite:

“To give someone time to learn is an act of love”.

To highlight her story, she taught us how to pronounce "I love you" in Brazillian Portugese (Eu te amo), showing how the distinctive Brazillian pronunciation of the phrase is a reminder of home for her. All in all, the contents weren’t the important part, it was the sharing of a real human story, of another person’s vulnerability in finding her identity abroad, that made this talk so compelling to me.

Gabriela’s message was her story of the difficulty of finding identity in another language.

Talk 6 - The Value of Language

After this, it was lunch-time, and it was absolutely delicious. This was also a great chance to get to know more of the attendees.

Once the break was over, it was time for what I'd been most excited for.

Dessert!

No, just kidding, it was of course David Peterson's talk. If you're not familiar, he created the Dothraki and High Valyrian fictional languages (conlangs) for Game of Thrones, along with many other fictional languages. He's one of the few people who is professionally employed as a conlanger, having enjoyed huge success from Game of Thrones. He's written a book about language invention, and my university ran a conlanging module in the linguistics department based on it. I had an interest in conlanging a while ago, hence why Peterson is someone I really respect for what he does.

And his talk did not disappoint. Full of humour, charisma and style, it was well worth coming down to London for. He talked about the value of language, and how many people had criticised Duolingo for the creation of a High Valyrian course - which Peterson was responsible for. How do we define what makes a language valuable - in terms of its economic viability? Then English and possibly Chinese are the only languages worth learning. He pointed out that language has cultural value - many minority languages would be subsumed by the majority: English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Russian, Arabic and so on, if our arguments for learning languages were all economic.

David reads out mean tweets about the High Valyrian course.

But what I particularly liked about his talk was the idea of linguistic facility. If you learn a little bit of German, a smidgen of Spanish, the first three lessons of High Valyrian and so on, you haven't wasted your time just because you haven’t learned any of those languages to fluency. With everything you learn, your linguistic facility increases. As you learn Spanish or German or Japanese or even High Valyrian, you’ll find out that languages inflect for gender, may have different word order, may have cases, may have silent subjects, may not represent articles in the same way as English does, uses prepositions differently, and so on.

Every encounter you have with a foreign language makes the process of learning a foreign language easier, because you start to realise what foreign languages can do differently.
So of course there is value in constructed languages, in natural languages, in minority and heritage languages, if learning them can be fun, motivating, and increase your ability to learn in general.

Talk 7 - Re(Connect): Heritage Languages and the Internet

Noah led the next talk, about minority languages and heritage languages, which focused on his own experience as an Irish speaker, and how Duolingo has helped to increase general interest in minority and heritage languages such as Irish, Navajo and Hawaiian. Heritage languages are those that speakers learn at home but may not go on to use as a first language (Irish and Welsh are always popular examples,) and minority languages are languages, unsurprisingly, spoken by a minority.

This was an interesting topic that I'd never really thought much about. He talked about the stigma attached to minority languages, as they're not required for day to day interactions where the hegemonic language will do just fine, thanks. They're usually considerably different to the hegemonic languages such as English, French and Spanish, so learning them is a steep curve with few handholds or cognates. And because they're minority languages, speakers are hard to identify - there may be many where you live, but you don't know who they are, so how can you practise speaking with them?

The potential benefits of the Internet and Duolingo for heritage languages such as Irish.

He talked, too, about how the internet and Duolingo have been making positive steps to address some of these issues. Cookies and personalisation allow online course designers to curtail language courses to a user's individual learning style and preference. At first I thought this seemed pandering and intrusive, but then I realised that this is no different to what a one to one tutor does in real life. They don't stick you into a one-size-fits-all teaching mold and expect you to emerge as fluent in X language as all of their other students. They consider your needs, strengths and weaknesses, and build a curriculum based on what you most need to work on, in a way that you're comfortable with. Using algorithms and Big Data to do that is, on reflection, not that different.

Forums, too, are a valuable tool for networking. The Irish speakers that can't find each other in Dublin or Cork or Kerry, now can through the advent of the internet. It's much easier to find people to practise a heritage language with when you can post on Reddit or Duolingo Forums, and arrange to meet other speakers just about wherever you are.

The last and interesting point Noah made, was that anonymity helps language learning. The absence of a real person watching you while you learn a language on Duolingo means that there's no pressure or expectations, no awkwardness, no feeling that you might disappoint someone else if you try and mess up. And that leaves you much freer to experiment with language, to go at your own pace, to try things you might not try with a one to one teacher. Those are huge boons for language learners studying minority languages that might be stigmatic in daily discourse. They engender, too, a sense of casualness. You're not here because you have to be, you're here because you want to be. Relaxation was a theme that Karin touched on in her talk as well, and it's relevant throughout Duolingo's learning model. When you're relaxed and free from pressure, you learn better. When you engage with a language on your own terms, not because the teacher or your parents made you, you learn better. When you're fundamentally enjoying the process of language learning, you learn better.

Talk 8 - Tools for Success: Supporting Course Creation at Scale

Jake’s presentation was a much more technically-focused talk, going into detail about how the Duolingo's incubator works. This is something that one or two attendees I spoke to didn't enjoy as much, as it's relevant to a specific audience. Personally, though I'm not a content creator, I found it just as interesting to see the design philosophy that goes into the incubator. If you're not aware, the incubator is where Duolingo courses are built before being released onto the app.

The process all starts with a spreadsheet, which pleased the Excel geek inside me.

The focus of Jake's talk was on the processes already in place, and new tools being built to improve the incubator. For example, TTS (Text to Speech) has been a part of big courses from the beginning in order to produce reliable audio samples. Some languages don't have TTS software, however, which led to the team creating a tool for course creators to record their own samples of Hawaiian, Navajo, Klingon, Latin or High Valyrian. Improved tools for addressing user reports were touched on, too.

New features in the incubator: the purple number shows how many users have reported an alternate translation for a sentence which they believe should be accepted. The red-green triangle represents a machine-learning algorithm which determines whether the alternate translation is likely to be accurate.

The other details, I’ll admit, didn’t interest me very much, but what I did find interesting were the "course metrics", which measure how well a course works in five aspects:

        -       Audio coverage - do all of the sentences have audio?
        -       Content coverage - number of lessons, skills, images etc.
        -       Hint coverage - how many words have hints?
        -       Lesson density - the number of words per lesson, lessons per skill etc.
        -       Lesson viability - the number of sentences per lesson


These last two metrics are particularly interesting, and the next speaker covered them in more detail. I wasn't entirely clear from the talk as to whether these metrics are something only the dev team have access to, or whether these are transparent for course creators, so they can quickly see improvements needed and action them appropriately. But I'm not a course creator, so they will know more about it.

Talk 9 - From Sentence to Session

The last talk - and if you've read this far, well done, as I know that was a lot of content - built on Jake's. Delivered by Maggie, she talked about the sentence "Tu oso bebe cerveza" (Your bear drinks beer) and used this to show not only how bizarre sentences can make courses more engaging, but how sentences and words are placed in a course. There were four factors that make up where a sentence is placed.

• Sentence viability - if all of the words or lexemes in a sentence have appeared somewhere previously in the rest of the tree, the sentence is viable. Duo only introduces one new lexeme at a time.
• Lexeme density - the number of new lexemes in a skill should be carefully controlled. The ideal is 6 or 7 new lexemes per skill.
• Number of lessons - this goes back to lesson density in Jake's presentation. The ideal number of lessons per skill is 4 to 6.
• CEFR difficulty - words in a skill tree can all be measured by their CEFR level, and need to be placed appropriately.

I thought it was fascinating that they had this data, based on user statistics, about what optimal learning involves. Again, I wasn’t wholly clear on whether these data are used prescriptively in order to guide course creators to making optimal skill trees, or whether they’re simply interesting observations.

Maggie’s favourite sentence.

And those were the talks. Afterwards, there was a Q&A panel session for the eight speakers (Luis had vanished into thin air,) where the panel took questions asked by viewers on Twitch. These went pretty fast, and I couldn’t keep notes on them, but you might be able to find them online. And then it was time to go! I got my obligatory selfie with the ever-obliging David Peterson, thanked the staff for putting on a great show, and made my way home.

Obligatory selfie.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the weekend, but honestly, I had a great time. The whole event was planned so meticulously. All the talks ran exactly to time, neither over nor under. There were no projector faults or catering issues or timing issues or anything else. All of the staff had clearly worked so hard to put the weekend together and were so passionate about what they were doing: that effort and commitment made for a fantastic experience.

So now, I’m looking forward to Duocon 2020. It won’t be in London again, but I’m happy to have any excuse to travel. I’m excited to see how it turns out.

From a photo booth that gave you free prints if you tagged your photo on Instagram. The text: 愛してる, or "I love you" in Japanese.