Duolingo is a free language-learning app which allows users to use research-based methods in order to teach reading, writing, and speaking skills and listening.
The popular app has well over 84 learners with a staggering 23 billion lessons being completed on the app with learners spending over a billion hours learning.
It tracks a person’s progress thereby adjusting both the order and difficulty of the lessons, allowing the user to focus on what they need the most help with interactive exercises including flashcards, multiple choice questions, listening exercises and then further using these new learnt words in sentences and phrases.
Duolingo currently offers 42 different languages – 40 of which are for English speakers but what are the 10 most popular languages on the free app?
According to Duolingo, the 10 most popular languages for English speakers as of June 2024, include:
- Spanish – 45.6m learners
- French – 26.0m learners
- Japanese – 21.5m learners
- Korean – 17.7m learners
- German – 17.4m learners
- Italian – 12.2m learners
- Hindi – 11.2m learners
- Chinese – 9.84m learners
- Russian – 8.20m learners
- Arabic – 7.90m learners
Intermediate English came at a surprising 12th on the list with 4.79m and is the only new course to join the list.
Other interesting language insights according to the app since it was last being updated in February 2023, including some surprising changes in the popularity rankings.
Korean has overtaken German yet again to become the fourth most popular language course with German previously being knocked off by Korean back in February 2023.
The language from Ukraine has seen a huge surge in popularity prior but Ukranian’s popularity has notably begun to tank falling from 15 to 23.
Ukrainian is the only language course that also saw a drop in the numbers of learners, down from 1.7 million to 1.4 million.
Italian took the 6th spot back from Hindi with High Valyrian seeing a big plummet.
High Valyrian is the language of the old Valyrian Freehold which was located on the continent of Essos and has dropped from 24 to 28th but despite the drop it did gain near learners going from 911,000 to 944,000.
Danish, Indonesian, Romanian and Finnish all passed 1 million learners with the African language Zulu seeing a surge with triple the amount of learners previously and jumping from 39th spot to 31.
