Duolingo launches its flagship English learning product for Indian kids
Duolingo, the popular US headquartered language-learning platform, has unveiled its flagship product ‘Duolingo ABC’ to help children in India learn the English language in a gamified way.
Duolingo launches new product for India
The newly launched product is designed to help children get better in the English language and is targeted towards kids of 3-8 years. Shares Karandeep Singh Kapany, country marketing manager of Duolingo India in a chat with The Drum, "While our core focus and mission has been language teaching, the introduction of Duolingo ABC aspires to tackle the global issue of illiteracy at grassroots levels."
Duolingo ABC has been designed as a free-to-use app for kids that includes over 700 bite-sized lessons teaching the alphabet, phonics, and sight words in a fun manner. There would be 9 different levels to start from that would help kids to learn at their own pace.
The launch of Duolingo ABC helps them increase their footprint to young kids, especially in a market like India with a sizable appetite for the language across consumers. India is one of their largest and fastest-growing markets globally, and the appetite for language learning is huge in India, both for English and non-English languages, adds Kapany. Incidentally Korean is the largest language in India for the app.
About the new launch, Kapany said, “The brand’s mission is to make learning free, fun and accessible to everyone, and in this goal, this free tool would help children in their early education of English language.” Duolingo ABC has already been launched across the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
It is a well-known fact that teaching people to read and write can change lives. Backed by their knowledge of languages and how people learn them, the company with the launch of Duolingo ABC is deploying its expertise in encouraging and motivating kids to build a strong literacy foundation with gamification and positively impact lives, shares Kapany.
The offering has been designed specifically for younger users to help them learn independently and keeping the target audience in mind, it is built on a child-friendly interface, with no ads and in-app purchases. While it makes learning for kids fun, the app also allows parents, guardians and educators to track their child's learning progress.
With personalization a key block for the app, the learning experience can be customized depending on the child’s level of reading. It can offer shorter, easier-to-decode words and stories in early levels, and provide longer-form stories with less support in later levels.
In addition to the short lessons, Duolingo ABC has also got fully illustrated short stories for encouraging kids to read out loud and learn from real-time feedback with speech recognition.
Duolingo was launched as a learning platform to the general public in 2012, and since then has come to be known as the world’s most popular language learning app with its offerings that include more than 40 languages across the globe. Its mascot Duo the owl in a striking green colour has become a well-recognized brand symbol with a huge social media following. As reported in its official TikTok account currently has over 6 million followers globally.
To create buzz for this new product, over the next few months, the brand plans on deploying a multi-pronged, parent-targeted communications model consisting of touch points such as influencer marketing, knowledge-based content cycles and strategic brand partnerships, shares Kapany.