Duolingo, you feeling ok? What learning a language during COVID is telling us about the state of the world.

Anyone else’s Duolingo got the touch of the feels?

I think it’s clear 2020 has gotten off to a rocky start (to say the least), and I have a feeling I won’t stop blogging about COVID for a while. As you may know I am learning Swedish, and I have started to notice I am learning some new COVID specific phrases which of course will help me in my day to day ‘Stanna hemma’ (stay home!) and ‘Flygplan flyger inte idag’ (Airplanes do not fly today) but also some I hope to not use in a very long time ‘De ringer mig om hon dör under natten’ (They will call me if she dies during the night). Duolingo is built on crowd sourcing language through a team of volunteers, instead of it remaining stagnant in a 10 year old language book, Duolingo allows us learners to pick up more relevant phrases as illustrated above.

Global traffic on Duolingo soared in March, as COVID-19 spread across the globe and as more countries began implementing stay-at-home orders and closing businesses and schools. Over the month of March, new users on Duolingo increased by 101%. The increase in new users was especially sharp from March 9 to March 16, the week in which the World Health Organization labeled the virus a global pandemic: growth in new users was 39% from one week to the next. (if you want to find out more check this out)