You know, all comparisons and speculation aside, despite living in a world that is English-centric, and despite the fact that for so many people learning a foreign language is simply something they are forced to do in school, I for one think it's fantastic that so many people sign up for *any* of the languages Duolingo offers. 46,000 learning Turkish, 22,000 signed up for when Hungarian starts- and those are very difficult languages that don't carry much water outside Turkey and Hungary. Even 14,000 signed up for Klingon!

Makes me think that the world is still full of people who are interested in (and have an enjoyment of) language for its own sake, and not only as a business necessity or school requirement.

So Esperanto has more signups than Klingon? Interesting! I assumed that Klingon would have far more awareness than Esperanto, at least where I live. Perhaps there is a chance, then. WE OUTNUMBER THE TREKKIES.

altindiefanboy:So Esperanto has more signups than Klingon? Interesting! I assumed that Klingon would have far more awareness than Esperanto, at least where I live. Perhaps there is a chance, then. WE OUTNUMBER THE TREKKIES.

I thought that you were joking at first but it really is in the incubator. Jen.

I am somewhat interested in learning Klingon but there is a problem. Klingon is copyrighted. I think this means that you can't make a youtube video, song, website, or book in Klingon without the proper licensing.

One thing that I like about Esperanto is that nobody owns it.

I am somewhat interested in learning Klingon but there is a problem. Klingon is copyrighted. I think this means that you can't make a youtube video, song, website, or book in Klingon without the proper licensing.

How very ironic. This would be a corporation's dream - have people pay you royalties just for the privilege of speaking your language. Brilliant! Even better than the time when Dilbert's company put a trademark on his name, and it cost him a dollar just to introduce himself ...

Noddy:Yes look at the numbers for Irish Gaelic too. According to Wikipedia there are c 280 000 native speakers and 1 million users at L2.

Duolingo has 615 000 users learning Irish. That's in less than 1 year since the course was released and less than 6 months out of Beta. They are very significant numbers even if you assume only a small number actually complete the course.

Esperanto has the added bonus that it's relatively easy to learn so hopefully more people will stick with it to completion.

I think you overestimate the amount of time people are willing to spend on something.

lernu is a different thing than Duolingo but I think its experience is instructive.

Slightly more than 3000 people have completed lesson 8 (the final lesson) of Ana Pana, lernu's main beginner course. If you work at it, you can do Ana Pana in about a week. If you work at it a lot less, you can do it in a month, easily. Finishing Ana Pana does not involve hours upon hours of study, to put it mildly. Yet only a bit more than 3000 of our nearly 200,000 registered users have completed Ana Pana. Why? Same reasons I gave for Duolingo above. Some people register for an account and never use the site at all. Some people have duplicate accounts. Some register for the site but already speak Esperanto so they don't do the course. Some do one lesson and lose interest (around 16,000 users at lernu have done Ana Pana's first lesson, so you can say the completion rate for Ana Pana, a short course, is a bit less than 20%).

Obviously Ana Pana isn't the Duolingo course, it's a totally different kind of course.

You might say that the Duolingo course is way more fun than Ana Pana, so people would be more likely to stick with it, leading to a better completion rate (that would be a mark in its favor).

You could almost certainly say that the Duolingo course is much longer than Ana Pana, so the completion rate would be less (that would be a mark against it).

The moral of the story is that we just don't know, but you should take these very high numbers with an extreme grain of salt, because a minuscule proportion of a site's registered users (or in this case a language's registered users) actually spend any significant time on the course, and an even more minuscule proportion actually finishes it.
(lernu statistics cited above found here, for anyone who is interested)

Edit: Duolingo seems to release numbers for how many people have signed up to a course but not for how many people have "completed a tree", their version of completing a course. They have self-reported numbers only, which aren't too reliable because not everyone will report and some will report inaccurately. Having said that, the statistics as of January say that, self-reported, 201 people had completed a tree in Spanish, a course with 38.1 registered learners. Even if only 10% of people who completed a tree self-reported its completion, we are talking about very low completion rates for the numbers we're talking about. [source]

erinja:Edit: Duolingo seems to release numbers for how many people have signed up to a course but not for how many people have "completed a tree", their version of completing a course. They have self-reported numbers only, which aren't too reliable because not everyone will report and some will report inaccurately. Having said that, the statistics as of January say that, self-reported, 201 people had completed a tree in Spanish, a course with 38.1 registered learners. Even if only 10% of people who completed a tree self-reported its completion, we are talking about very low completion rates for the numbers we're talking about.

We should bear in mind that these number are only of 5 months (August-December) and as you pointed out, those numbers are self-reported.

lernu is a different thing than Duolingo but I think its experience is instructive.

No doubt. I think the main difference between duolingo and lernu is accessibility. Lernu is very hard to use on mobile devices, while duolingo has native applications. Also in countries where internet.org has been launched (like 2 months ago in Guatemala) you can use duolingo even if you don't have a data plan, and if you have a data plan duolingo's usage doesn't count against the volume (MBs, GBs) you pay.

No matter how many people complete their skill tree of Esperanto on duolingo, it will surely be the biggest ad campaign for Esperanto ever.

Duolingo has done incredible things for people [1] in the past and now it is doing an incredible thing for Esperanto in general. We should be happy about this.

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[1] For instance, young males in Guatemala can basically chose from three occupations: drug trafficker, hitman or call center employee [2]. The latter has certain advantage over the first two. Now, in order to work in a call center you need to speak English. It is enough to have basic knowledge of this language, because if you fulfill a minimum requirement, the call centers themselves will give you advanced courses. But you need some knowledge of English in the first place in order to apply for those programs. This is where duolingo comes in. You need a cell phone (in Guatemala we have more cell phones than people) and you don't even need a data (internet) plan, because its usage is covered by internet.org. You teach yourself English to some basic level and then you apply with Telus, 24/7-customer or Allied for a job and their English programs. This qualifies in my opinion as "incredible things for people". Obviously in the USA, where there is virtually no need to study a foreign language in order not to end up in a ditch at the age of 20, the conditions are different. Obviously this doesn't apply to Esperanto either.
[2] Or male prostitute for tourists.

nornen:
[1] For instance, young males in Guatemala can basically chose from three occupations: drug trafficker, hitman or call center employee...
[2] Or male prostitute for tourists.

In many countries, you don't get to chose. It isn't a fair world.

We are overpopulating the earth. I can trace almost every single problem that the world is facing to overpopulation. Name anything and I will show you how it is the direct result of overpopulation.

erinj:I think you overestimate the amount of time people are willing to spend on something.

lernu is a different thing than Duolingo but I think its experience is instructive.

Slightly more than 3000 people have completed lesson 8 (the final lesson) of Ana Pana, lernu's main beginner course. If you work at it, you can do Ana Pana in about a week. If you work at it a lot less, you can do it in a month, easily. Finishing Ana Pana does not involve hours upon hours of study, to put it mildly. Yet only a bit more than 3000 of our nearly 200,000 registered users have completed Ana Pana. Why? Same reasons I gave for Duolingo above. Some people register for an account and never use the site at all. Some people have duplicate accounts. Some register for the site but already speak Esperanto so they don't do the course. Some do one lesson and lose interest (around 16,000 users at lernu have done Ana Pana's first lesson, so you can say the completion rate for Ana Pana, a short course, is a bit less than 20%).

Good points. The real difference though, between Lernu and Duolingo is that people seek out Lernu who already have some real interest in Esperanto. The chances are remote they will run across it casually, and if they do, they are unlikely to register. So, I think that has this implication: some percentage (maybe 10-20%, which seems to be supported by the self-reported Esperanto levels in the site statistics) of the registered users can be considered more-than-casual Esperanto learners/speakers. While Ana Pana is an interesting metric, I don't think it is entirely reliable: I never did Ana Pana- just couldn't stomach it. I did "bildoj kay demandoj" to the end. I've also passed the beginners exam (Yay me!), although that was more a lark than anything else, and probably also not something to give much weight to. I get virtually all my Esperanto instruction from Memrise.com, textbooks, and listening to CRI, kernpunkto, and other such sites.

Duolingo, on the other hand, will attract literally *millions* of people to the site. Of those, maybe only a small fraction will start an Esperanto course, and an even smaller fraction will finish it- but you are still looking at *A LOT* of people- potentially as many serious learners as Lernu- or even more, as people who are serious learners of other languages see the Esperanto course and think "Oh, hey- I always wondered about that- let's give it a try".

Even if there is a million sign up at Duolingo, if the Esperantujo still does not think and care of the job for the learners, unless the language lover, Esperanto still cannot go further.

In fact, I have slow down in promoting Esperanto when each time seeing the congress post. Olympic holds once in 4 years to help to improve the economy etc situation in the host country. But UKo is yearly and the host does not able to promote Esperanto locally, not even able to make Esperanto as the Saturday classes.

The internet.org is functioned in the Philippines now. Certainly, the Filipinoj still like English more than Esperanto even Mary Jane Veloso is clearly proof that English cannot help to improve the economy in the country. If Esperanto is as the choice of learning in the schools, Mary would have able to read better and would not face that much of problem and more people can know the corruption level.

I do not know the Saluton Kurso has the mobile phone version as I am unable to surf it on my mobile phone, black and white phone.

Esperantists like to use Esperanto as the internacia lingvo, but this internacia lingvo is not able to function in all fields but they are still proudly mentioned it without knowing it is internet age now.

I would support the landa esperanta kongreso more than the UKo

Of course, would still press the NGOs to respect the UNESCO resolutions 1985.

erinja:

I think you overestimate the amount of time people are willing to spend on something.

lernu is a different thing than Duolingo but I think its experience is instructive.

Slightly more than 3000 people have completed lesson 8 (the final lesson) of Ana Pana, lernu's main beginner course. If you work at it, you can do Ana Pana in about a week. If you work at it a lot less, you can do it in a month, easily. Finishing Ana Pana does not involve hours upon hours of study, to put it mildly. Yet only a bit more than 3000 of our nearly 200,000 registered users have completed Ana Pana. Why? Same reasons I gave for Duolingo above. Some people register for an account and never use the site at all. Some people have duplicate accounts. Some register for the site but already speak Esperanto so they don't do the course. Some do one lesson and lose interest (around 16,000 users at lernu have done Ana Pana's first lesson, so you can say the completion rate for Ana Pana, a short course, is a bit less than 20%)....

.....The moral of the story is that we just don't know, but you should take these very high numbers with an extreme grain of salt, because a minuscule proportion of a site's registered users (or in this case a language's registered users) actually spend any significant time on the course, and an even more minuscule proportion actually finishes it.
(lernu statistics cited above found here, for anyone who is interested)

Whilst I agree that people should be cautious over the exact numbers, and I agree only a small number will actually complete the course you have to remember that Duolingo has a truly massive user base. For example 33 million have signed up to do 'English for Spanish Speakers' and 31 million have signed up to do 'Spanish for English Speakers'. This website is less than four years old!

As Duolingo grows it's developing some useful features too. I really hope Esperantists exploit the 'Schools' option. This allows the 'teacher' to keep track of how 'students' are doing and could be an excellent tool for local Esperanto groups to teach beginners with.

As someone else has pointed out Duolingo is not just a website - it's a popular mobile phone app. This is actually the preferred option for around 80% of the user base! A lot people use it on their daily commute or during their lunch break. Lernu is great but it, and most other Esperanto websites/teaching apps, simply do not have these abilities.

I also think you have to remember that although many people won't finish the course some will still become Esperantists through other means - delving into other Esperanto websites, finding podcasts, going on local courses etc, so I still think the development of this course (and sister versions from other languages) will potentially have one of the greatest impacts on Esperanto ever.