"Not a lot of people know how to type in Hindi. "There is a kind of correlation in India when it comes to English language skills and computer literacy," according to Gupta. Hindi, however, represented a different challenge. And typing in English is a hassle-free experience for most users, with most of the population making use of English language keyboards on their smartphones and computers. More than 2 out of 3 Indians on the platform, however, are on there to learn English. With over 10.1 million users in the country, India is among the service's top 10 largest markets worldwide. Add to that, using Devanagari script instead of the commonly used Latin script, on Duolingo, meant everything had to made from scratch, with little help from the internal team.Äuolingo is optimistic about India. "I learnt a bit of German on Duolingo, and that is another example where every object is assigned a gender." According to Gupta, devising a simple way for users to judge the verbs, objects, and adjectives was one of the toughest aspects of creating the Hindi course. "Everything is gendered in Hindi," he says. The Hindi course will be available on the mobile app at a later date. "So, we alternated it with 'Billi jaanwar hoti hai' for most of the similar cases." For instances of definite articles, the workaround was that variations of hota would be omitted to make it appear like a definite statement. "The translation of the phrase 'A cat is an animal' would be 'Ek billi ek jaanwar hai' makes no sense," Gupta explains. In the absence of definite articles, he says they had to take advantage of the indefinite alternative. "When teaching on a translation-based service, we have to give users a certain answer on how articles are supposed to be used," says Gupta. One of the major differentiators of Hindi as a language is the absence of articles A, An, and The. We had to design the lessons in a way that learning seems thematic with a blend of vocabulary and grammar." All the learning happens intrinsically, with translation on the go. "The lessons had to be kept just around the right length, because we can't even keep them too short. "If the lessons are too long and the content is too much, users tend to drop out of the courses," says Gupta. And, with a model like that of Duolingo, user retention is extremely tough. One of the major areas of concern, especially for a learning app, is the diminishing attention span among users. The course will be available via Duolingo's Android and iOS apps at a later date. Since then, the Hindi course has undergone alpha testing, and is now available to all users via the Duolingo website. "From Sept to early Jan, we were implementing in the system, on Duolingo Incubator, then we locked the course and handed it over to the engineering team," says Gupta. The first three months went into researching what kind of vocabulary and grammar elements should go into the course. "We decided we want to teach the language along with the script," he says. While work on the new Hindi course started officially in 2015, the course that has launched is the one Gupta started working on in July last year. "Eventually, after the English course was done - which we reinvented from scratch - they asked me if I would like to work on the Hindi course as well." "I've been associated with Duolingo since February 2016, and I started as a freelancer with them for user study," says Guptam, who also helped Duolingo create English course for Hindi speakers. Gadgets 360 caught up Kanan Gupta, the principal course creator behind Duolingo's Hindi course, to get some insights around the elements of the course and on how Duolingo plans to grow in India in the coming years. With the new course, the services aims to target tourists coming to India, learners who are looking to work in the country, and others generally interested in the Indian language. Having earlier launched English-learning courses for speakers of Hindi and several other Indian languages, Duolingo has now released its Hindi course for English speakers. The service has made learning simple and fun by gamification of the entire experience. Duolingo is a popular platform for learning new languages with apps on Android, iOS, as well as Windows, apart from its website.
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