Du bist mein Zucker, und ich bin Salz.
Have you heard of Duolingo? We love it here at AmongMen.
Duolingo’s a completely free language-learning program accessible online or on your android phone, the first of its kind. Currently you can learn most of the romance languages, and German. It’s got a success record that rivals Rosetta Stone.
Ich bin ein Mann.
Oh, also: it’s a crowd-sourced text translation platform. This means every time you translate a word or sentence on the program, you’re actually helping to translate a text somewhere online, like on Wikipedia. Computers still can’t intelligently do this, but Duolingo has you doing it even before you know how.
The program itself is painstakingly simple and interface friendly. Recently, the site has updated the app, slimming the download size to 4.8mb and tweaking a few of the graphics.
Wunderbar!
Duolingo was created by Luis von Ahn, who’s basically the internet’s Mother Teresa. Before making a free language-learning program that translates the web, he invented CAPTCHAs. You’ve seen a CAPTCHA before, it’s that word or series of letters and numbers you have to retype from an image when a computer wants to verify that you’re actually a human, usually when you’re using your credit card.
When von Ahn realized how much communal time the human race spent deciphering CAPTCHAs― millions of hours a year, in ten second increments— he realized we could all use that time to work on something together, if he got it organized. This is when he made reCAPTCHA, and now every CAPTCHA you fill out is a distorted scan of a word from a book. When you retype the word from the image, you’re digitizing that word from that book, something else computers still can’s effectively do without human aid.
We’ve digitized hundreds of thousands of books this way.
Check out Duolingo, use the site or download the program to your phone to learn a new language easily, and for free. You’re among Renaissance men.
