How Duolingo added Haitian Creole to its language library

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Duolingo will offer lessons for learning Haitian Creole, adding to a library of languages including French, Japanese, Navajo, and Yiddish.

To develop the content for the lessons, Duolingo worked with linguists like Nicolas André from Florida International University.

“There was a lot of figuring out what we want to present to our learners when actually Haitian creole speakers themselves may not all feel the same way about what is the accepted spelling, what actually is the best way to say this sentence or this idea,” Blanco says. “For many languages like Spanish and French there are actually formal organizations that do this. There’s now one for Haitian Creole as well, so our team relied a lot on these developing standards for the language.

“The tech we have is actually really flexible. As long as we give the right information, it can pull from our lessons, sentences and vocabulary and things to create a lesson,” says Blanco. The machine learning algorithm they have can also track the content and exercises users are processing through to tweak what they see next. For example, if a user is doing particularly well with a concept, the algorithm might trigger more difficult exercises earlier.

“It is really hard for grownups. That’s also motivated some of the development of the app,” she notes. “We know exposure and input is really important. So we’ve tried to make it really fun and easy to get back into the language so you can do it for 5 minutes on your commute, you can do it just before going to bed, you don’t need to block out this hour of classroom time.”

“There’s some general things we know about difficulty that are true across the board. Receptive [exercises], translating to English, that’s going to be easier for everybody,” Blanco says. “But based on your personal pattern of mistakes and errors, it figures out what exercises have been tricky for you, what vocabulary and grammar you have more difficulty with, and we can personalize based on your particular learning pattern.

 

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