There are approximately 1.2 billion people learning a new language, and the majority are doing so in pursuit of a better life. As part of our mission to make education free for everyone, we studied millions of people spanning every country on the planet... until we made a shocking research discovery that forever changed the way we think about education.
Jack Morgan is a British designer and brand consultant based in the United States. Formerly the Lead Designer for Google’s education division, he designed the Google Squared and Google Digital Academy training programs, culminating in the launch of Google Academy London – a purpose-built facility located at 123 Buckingham Palace Road and dedicated to helping people improve their tech skills.
He has since produced an acclaimed documentary about Syrian refugees watched by over 1 million people and endorsed by the United Nations (Something Like Home), created a notorious craft beer brewery (Brewolingo) and designed a revolutionary adaptive AI Testing platform (DET).
My name is Jack Morgan, and I’m a designer at a company called Duolingo. If you haven’t heard of Duolingo, we are actually the most downloaded education app in the world,
Our mission is to make language education free for everyone. There are now more than 300 million people using Duolingo to learn a language for free.
It turns out there are approximately 1.2 billion people learning a new language. The vast majority are learning one language in particular; a language spoken by everyone in this room.
About 800 million people are learning English…
…and many of them are doing it to get out of poverty.
The reason is simple: in most countries, you can earn 25% - 100% more just by knowing how to speak English.
But what about the other 400 million people? Why are they learning a new language? This is the question we’ve begun asking ourselves as our user base grows, and as we think about how we can reach all of those 1.2 billion people and beyond. Are they learning a new language to travel? To connect with their family or their partners families? Or are there other reasons that we’re not aware of?
We have one of if not the largest data sets of active language learners in existence; and we studied millions of people using Duolingo to learn a new language, spanning every country on the planet. We discovered a lot of interesting things, like the best time of day to study for maximum retention; people who study right before they go to bed remember far more than people who study at other times. But we didn’t just look at how people were learning a new language, we also looked at where they were in the world, and what language they were learning.
This map shows us the most popular language to learn in each country around the world. It tells us a lot of interesting things, for example - you can see that (as we suspected) most of the world is learning English (shown in green) - including Central and South America, Russia, the Middle East and China - all learning English. But then we noticed something else. Something… strange.
The data told us that the most popular language to learn in Sweden is... Swedish. Sounds like a mistake, doesn’t it? It can’t be that hard to learn, right? So why is this - why is the most popular language to learn in Sweden Swedish?
Well, It turns out that it's because of refugees. Sweden saw a 10x increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum in the country between 2015 - 2016. And as soon as they arrived they all started learning Swedish. But where did they all come from?
Many of them came from Syria. In fact, there are now more registered Syrian refugees than the entire population of the city of Los Angeles. There are more than 6 million registered Syrian refugees. It’s hard to really picture what that’s like in reality, isn’t it? Technology people are quite disconnected from problems like this. Perhaps it’s because we’re not used to looking at graphs like this…
…we’re used to looking at graphs like this. We are used to focusing on Technology problems, not People problems.
I’ll give you an example: The UN came out with a study showing that more people have access to cell phones than toilets. I don’t know whether to be impressed or ashamed, but it certainly says a lot about our priorities, doesn’t it?
Too often, I find we focus on technology problems - scaling users, optimizing for retention, growing revenue - while not paying enough attention to the people on the receiving end.
Many of us, through no fault of our own, have forgotten that data points are actually people. That every notch in the line graph is a human being. In other words as more people got connected, we have become more disconnected.
That’s why this discovery bothered me so much. I was proud that the work I was doing helped people in need - but what I could see was one dimensional. All this was, was yet another data point.
So we decided to do something about it. Something that would make most of us in this room very uncomfortable. Something most tech companies in today’s day and age would never even dream of…
…we talked to our users. I don’t mean user research, I mean we actually talked to them, like real people.
What we heard back were stories like this one. They proved that truly understanding our users can’t come from charts and statistics alone - it has to come from people. But this still wan’t enough. It wasn’t the source of what we were looking for. So we decided to go further…
…much further actually, about 6,000 miles further, to be exact. We flew to the middle east to find and meet the people that wrote back to us.
Our journey begins in Gaziantep, a city just over the border from Syria.
The first person to let us into his home was Alaa. He protested against the Syrian government when the war began, and he was arrested and taken to jail. But this was no ordinary jail.
He was placed in a small room with fifty other men. So small that they had to sit with their knees to their chests, unable to stand. He said he did not see the sun for one year.
Once he was released, he fled Syria and decided to start again in Turkey. And this is where the story takes a more positive turn… he learned to speak both English and Turkish, and is now a school teacher - giving computer programming and Arabic classes to middle-school kids.
Next up is a lady named Noor. Originally from Iraq, she fled when a car bomb exploded outside of her house, shattering the windows and sending bullets flying in all directions.
She also moved to Turkey, and taught herself Turkish, and she now speaks five languages - including English - and has become a successful software engineer in a part of the world where you don't find many female software engineers.
Her name simply means: “the light” Which I think is quite appropriate.
The final stop on our journey was Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan - one of the largest refugee camps on the planet.
Azraq has a population of 37,000 refugees.
Out of 37,000 refugees, 60% are children.
Very difficult.
It turns out that the camp actually uses Duolingo to teach refugees English, for free.
When we first showed up, they were worried we had come to sue them…
…for copyright infringement, because they put our logo on the certificates they give to their students.
They introduced us to a young man called Mahmoud. Mahmoud is 15 years old. He has lived at Azraq Refugee Camp since he was a child. After fleeing Syria, his family had to move between more than 30 different towns before they arrived at the refugee camp.
Mahmoud is obsessed with learning. We asked him what he would say if he could send a message to everyone in the United States...
We met countless people on our journey, and as they let us into their homes, their families and their pasts, slowly but surely the data points became people. The charts became faces.
They all seemed to have one thing in common; they were not learning a new language to earn 25% more, or to get a better job. They were learning a new language to survive. For them, a new language was a chance at a new life. A chance to find home again.
We decided to turn the footage into a documentary called Something Like Home - it was released on World Refugee Day in 2018, and has since been watched by more than one million people.
It promotes the United Nation’s Refugee Council petition; asking governments to ensure that all refugees in their country have access to free education.
So as we go forward, we build our product not just for the 300 million users we have, but for all 1.2 billion people learning a language - we consider ourselves responsible for them now. The same goes for you; for better or worse, in today’s world your work has impact far beyond what you can imagine. While you don’t often get to decide who is impacted by your work, you can decide how they are impacted, and what work you choose to do as a result. For all you know, their future could be in your hands.
