Welcome to our Daily Homeroom.

For those of y'all who are new to this,

this is something that we started doing a few weeks ago

as we started seeing the mass school closures

and obviously Khan Academy, we're a not-for-profit

with a mission of providing a free world class education

for anyone, anywhere.

And we realized that as the schools were closing,

we wanted to put our resources together

so they could be as useful as possible

for you, the student, the teacher, the parent.

And we also wanted to provide more supports

especially since all of us are now socially distanced,

so that we can feel connected,

so that we could answer each other's questions,

so that we can support each other.

And so we've been running teacher webinars,

parent webinars and we have been doing this Daily Homeroom

which is just a way to connect,

talk about whatever y'all have on your mind

and to have interesting guests.

Now before we get into the meat of the homeroom so to speak,

I will say what I always say, a reminder that we are

a not-for-profit.

We are funded with philanthropic donations.

We were running at a deficit,

even before this COVID crisis hit

and now our traffic is about 2.5X, 3X

of what it typically is

and so our costs have gone more

and we wanna provide more supports.

So if you are in a position to do so,

please think about donating to Khan Academy.

I do wanna give special thanks to several corporate partners

who have stepped up in the last few weeks,

really in record time, to help Khan Academy

with this effort.

Bank of America, Novartis, Google.org, AT&T

and of course there's many other long-time supporters

but we still need more help.

We're still digging into our reserves

in order to stay operational.

So now that I've given you my plug,

I wanna introduce our guest.

You know, we've had a lot of questions

about all things academic.

How do we keep learning in math?

How do we keep learning in the humanities

and how do you keep learning in foreign language?

And so I have today, Luis von Ahn,

a old friend of mine who is the founder, CEO of Duolingo.

Many of y'all might be familiar.

It's a place, it's an app,

where you can learn languages for free.

But I don't know, Luis, you're more qualified than I am.

Tell me about what y'all do at Duolingo.

- Well thank you for having me, Sal.

And thank you for this initiative.

It's great that you guys are doing it.

Well at Duolingo, I mean, we teach languages,

that's the main thing we do.

You can either do it online in a computer at Duolingo.com

or you can download an iPhone app or an Android app.

It's free to learn, it's entirely free to learn

and you can learn as much as you want for free.

And the other thing is that we spend a lot of time

making sure that it's fun to learn a language with Duolingo.

So it feels a lot like you're playing a game

when you're learning on Duolingo.

We've worked really hard on that.

- And I can see,

we're seeing some screenshots now from Duolingo.

And Luis, I guess, how were people using Duolingo before?

Was it being integrated with your kind of traditional

you know, high school classes in languages

or is it mainly adults who are trying to learn maybe

for a business trip?

And how are you seeing the usage change

since the crisis began?

- Yeah, I mean, we have a ton of users.

I mean, we have over 300 million users worldwide.

It's all over the place.

The age range is from you know, six, seven, eight years old

to 90 some years old.

There's, as far as we know, we don't know for a fact

because we don't really track this,

anybody can really use Duolingo, but as far as we know

about 25% of our language classrooms in the U.S.

Use Duolingo in one way or another.

So we do have a lot of student users but we also have a lot

of adult users who are just you know,

wanting to improve on their high school French or something.

Since everybody's been staying at home, we've seen our usage

go up quite a bit.

And you know, our user base is pretty global,

only about 20% of our users are in the United States.

And one thing that's been interesting is pretty much

every country, as soon as they apply

their social distancing measures, we see traffic increase

about one or two days after that.

And it depends on the country.

In some countries it has more than doubled,

in some countries it has gone up by 50%, it kinda depends

on the country, but we've seen that.

The first country obviously where we saw that was China.

About three months ago, basically the traffic

in China doubled and it's remained like that.

So you know, I don't know what that means.

A lot of China's back to normal or mostly normal

yet our traffic remains essentially twice

what it was before.

- And what do you think is underlying that?

Let's say China for example, I am curious what language

are folks learning?

Is it all languages, is it English?

And then what do you think is the motivation?

People are like, "I'm home, I might as well

do something productive."

Or is there other motivations?

- I think there's both.

I think there's a lot of kids who had to be in school

and now are home and they're trying to figure out how to

you know, how to learn whatever they used to be learning

and a lot of teachers are telling them to use Duolingo.

But there's also people who are just bored at home

and you know, it used to be the case that they used to go

to a restaurant, now that time is being occupied

for something else.

And they think that you know, improving their lives

is an important thing.

So I think a lot of people are doing that.

In terms of what languages people are learning,

it really depends on the country.

In most non-English speaking countries,

people are learning English.

That's the main language that most everybody is learning.

In the United States, the biggest language is Spanish,

second is French, then German, then Japanese.

And then it tapers off quite a bit.

From English, you can learn about 35 languages on Duolingo.

But some of the smaller ones, you can learn High Valyrian

from Game of Thrones, you can learn you know, Esperanto.

You can learn a lot of kind of some of the smaller languages

but not too many people are learning those

compared to Spanish for example.

- Is High Valyrian a fully, fleshed out language

that like we could have a rich conversation in?

- I think so.

I think there's a lot of strange things, I think it has

a lot of different words for things like "sword"

or stuff like that.

- Yes, as we know Eskimos have six words for ice so I guess.

- Let me tell you something else which I don't know

what this says about the world.

When the seasons were on for Game of Thrones,

there were more people learning High Valyrian on Duolingo

than there were people learning Irish for example

or Scottish which, yeah, I don't know what this says

about the world but that was the case.

- Fascinating, fascinating.

And what's your sense?

So now there's a lot of parents and adults who you know,

I have always had aspirations to get better

at certain languages or learn certain languages.

What's your general advice there?

I guess this advice would carry over even if we weren't

in this crisis situation.

Where do you think Duolingo's really strong

and then what would you supplement that with

if you really were trying to you know, get conversational

in Spanish or English or some other language?

- Yeah, I mean I think, well the first thing to know

about learning a language is it takes a while you know?

There's a lot of you know, kind of fake news marketing

out there that says you can get fluent in a language

in nine days or whatever, this is just not true.

It'll take years to get really fluent in a language.

You can get a lot of progress in a few months

but if you really, really wanna get very advanced

in a language, it takes years.

So the first thing I think you gotta do is build a habit

as with most everything else.

So if you build a habit you know, spend 15, 20 minutes a day

using Duolingo and you do it over a long period of time,

you get quite good at it.

You know, things I would recommend, once you get to a point

where you've done about half the Duolingo course

or maybe a little more than that, I would recommend watching

you know, you can watch Netflix in you know, Spanish

or shows in other languages,

I would recommend watching those.

A lot of times you can watch them with the subtitles.

Now try watching them with the subtitles

in the language you're learning, not in English

because then you just won't pay attention.

But if you watch with the subtitles in Spanish too,

I think that's a pretty good way to get much better at

you know, after you do Duolingo.

But you can't quite start by doing that

because it's pretty hard to understand the things.

- Yeah, and I remember that I used to watch

these Spanish dramas when I was trying to learn Spanish.

It is effective.

And you've touched on some questions

you know, from Instagram.

Sanoff_7 asks, "How do you establish a habit

"of learning everyday?"

You just mentioned the importance of habit.

What do you recommend for people who are trying that?

- Yeah, well one of the important things, I think,

is to do it everyday at the same time, that helps.

If you just for example, personally the way I do it

is basically as soon as I wake up.

Kinda the first thing I do is do my Duolingo.

If you pair it with something else, it's like, "Well,

"I'll do it right after I brush my teeth," or "I'll do it

"right after lunch," and do it at the same time everyday,

that seems to really help.

Another thing is that it's the first maybe 20 ish days

that really matter.

I mean, we see it in our data.

If we can get you to come back consistently

for about 20 days, then you'll come back to Duolingo

for very long periods of time.

So you just gotta try to stick to it for about 20 days.

- I see, and we have some questions for you in particular

you know, from YouTube.

Reverend Hogwash is asking, "How many languages

"does Luis speak?"

And you just mentioned that you

are still learning languages, so I'll extend that.

Not only how many do you speak but what are you trying

to learn right now?

- Okay, I will say I am relatively good at English,

I am relatively good at Spanish, about the same,

English and Spanish.

I'm pretty good at Portuguese,

not quite as good as English but almost,

and then I am intermediate beginner in French.