I'm in a few Skype groups for Esperanto, and we ALREADY have someone who's just joined because they started learning Esperanto for the first time with Duolingvo. I've also seen a lot of other people comment (on places like Tumblr) that they were specifically waiting for this course to come out and didn't want to learn Esperanto with another method.

I also reported some errors and alternate translations, and was overall fairly disappointed that so many obvious translations were missing even in the very first levels (and I'm talking about the English translations of the Esperanto!), but I guess they just wanted to get it out to the public faster. Actually, I was finding so many problems that I couldn't continue trying to test out of the levels, it was too frustrating. I might try again in a couple months. I also thought that the sentences were rather boring ("You kiss the man"... okay, but why do I need to learn words like man and kiss first?), and we have tons of super funny things in Esperanto so it seemed a bit strange to just start out with what seems to be the same sorts of things as in all the other courses. But oh well! The more learners the merrier.

It should also be pointed out that this is course v1.0. Not only will errors and missing translations be fixed as the beta progresses but there will be a further major release (v2.0) at some point which has a set of 10 extra skills that will be added to the end of the tree.

Duolingo Esperanto team blog:
So, Christmas is over and now it's time to figure out what to do with the tree. Many of you were asking why we couldn't launch the course earlier, since we have so much of the early parts done already. Well, I was happy that Luis von Ahn popped into the Esperanto Incubator chatroom last week and we talked about that possibility. Our team agreed with him that we should cut all the lessons out after the last checkpoint and after we release the course into beta, we can add these lessons back in the 2.0 version of our tree, so everyone can get started faster and we can also discover potential issues with our course earlier.

So, this explains why our course suddenly went up to 60% complete. You can see the tree at Duolingo: Esperanto coming soon! and just imagine it without any skills after Communication and Abstract Objects 2. Feliĉan novan jaron!

Past the 20 000 mark...

I think Duolingo will bring more speakers in. I would be an example. I never considered Esperanto until the course came out, but now I am really enjoying learning it as well as reading up on the history and reach of the language. I confess I had no idea of the extent of the Esperanto world! I am looking forward to dropping into the local conversation group when I am a bit more advanced.

revstevelondon:I think Duolingo will bring more speakers in. I would be an example. I never considered Esperanto until the course came out, but now I am really enjoying learning it as well as reading up on the history and reach of the language. I confess I had no idea of the extent of the Esperanto world! I am looking forward to dropping into the local conversation group when I am a bit more advanced.

Great to hear this! I have seen a sudden increase in the activity on the English subforum as of late, after a few weeks of a lull ... I think it's too early to tell whether this is related to the Duolingo release (correlation is not equal to causation, after all), but it would be interesting to get access to some Lernu user statistics after a few weeks/months and compare.

The thing about Duolingo is that it's very encouraging to keep at it because your modules deplete if you don't keep it up daily. I don't know how much better it is than a traditional type course, but that's probably not the point. It's a great additional tool and really forces you to think about your translations on the spot. I'm enjoying going through it.

revstevelondon:I think Duolingo will bring more speakers in. I would be an example. I never considered Esperanto until the course came out, but now I am really enjoying learning it as well as reading up on the history and reach of the language. I confess I had no idea of the extent of the Esperanto world! I am looking forward to dropping into the local conversation group when I am a bit more advanced.

If I may, what took thee so long? I mean Esperanto's presence on the 'net has been around almost as long as the 'net has (20-25 years at the very least), so I was wondering at the reason for thy delay in learning it. Was it because DL was/is the best learning tool thee had come across at that point?

I myself learned about Esperanto way back in the dark ages (1975) when there was none of this "go to Amazon and click a few times and voila! there's a book in the mailbox in a few days" stuff back then! I had to go to the library and look in a multi-volume book of books in print to find any esperanto books available and then go to the bookstore and ORDER it (hoping their distributor even carried it) and then wait a couple weeks before it got to my mailbox. Lemme tell thee, it was a hassle but one I was glad I went through.

orthohawk:

revstevelondon:I think Duolingo will bring more speakers in. I would be an example. I never considered Esperanto until the course came out, but now I am really enjoying learning it as well as reading up on the history and reach of the language. I confess I had no idea of the extent of the Esperanto world! I am looking forward to dropping into the local conversation group when I am a bit more advanced.

If I may, what took thee so long? I mean Esperanto's presence on the 'net has been around almost as long as the 'net has (20-25 years at the very least), so I was wondering at the reason for thy delay in learning it. Was it because DL was/is the best learning tool thee had come across at that point?

The way I see it, not all people are equally motivated to learn languages(*), let alone an underrated one like Esperanto, and if DL reaches to a larger audience then I think it's great.

(*) and different individuals find motivation in different things too so the difference might be more qualitative than quantitative.

yyaann:

orthohawk:

revstevelondon:I think Duolingo will bring more speakers in. I would be an example. I never considered Esperanto until the course came out, but now I am really enjoying learning it as well as reading up on the history and reach of the language. I confess I had no idea of the extent of the Esperanto world! I am looking forward to dropping into the local conversation group when I am a bit more advanced.

If I may, what took thee so long? I mean Esperanto's presence on the 'net has been around almost as long as the 'net has (20-25 years at the very least), so I was wondering at the reason for thy delay in learning it. Was it because DL was/is the best learning tool thee had come across at that point?

The way I see it, not all people are equally motivated to learn languages, let alone an underrated one like Esperanto, and if DL reach to a larger audience then I think it's great.

But that's just it; Se* said that se never considered Esperanto before the DL course came out. The way se phrased this it seems to me se knew about Speranto before the DL oourse, but chose not to learn it. If that be the case, I was just wondering why it took Esperanto's coming out on DL for sem* to decide to learn it when se knew about it before that. IOW, what's so special about the DL course that suddenly convinced sem to learn Esperanto?

*I use gender-neutral pronouns se/ses/sem (subject/possessive/object) in English when I don't know the gender of the person i'm talking about.

orthohawk:
But that's just it; Se* said that se never considered Esperanto before the DL course came out. The way se phrased this it seems to me se knew about Speranto before the DL oourse, but chose not to learn it. If that be the case, I was just wondering why it took Esperanto's coming out on DL for sem* to decide to learn it when se knew about it before that. IOW, what's so special about the DL course that suddenly convinced sem to learn Esperanto?

Different things click with different people. I am very particular about the way I learn languages myself. If I have no way to easily import my learning material into my favorite SRS program, I'm much less likely to keep studying.

As to what people like about DL, I can't speak on their behalf. However, having tried it myself, I liked the game-esque atmosphere, the daily goals (in experience points), the requirement to complete the first set of units to gain access to the next one, etc. It works much in the same way as video games and probably activates the reward chemicals in the brain just as much. The sense of achievement is probably similar too.