Two innovative alternatives to Duolingo

Learning a new language is difficult.

To make it easier, the makers of Fluent launched a new iteration of their learn-a-language Chrome extension yesterday.

“We want Fluent to be the best teacher, ever… We think that seeing yourself get a little better, every single day, is the best motivator of all.” - Gavid D, Maker

Fluent’s goal is to help you learn a new language (right now French and Spanish with Italian on the way) while you’re browsing the web — from Product Hunt to Twitter.



One of the main feature updates is tracking your progress against each word you learn, with little low-key quizzes built into your browser. You might already be aware of a similar product called Toucan, which launched onto Product Hunt seven months ago. A couple of other early adopters were curious about the differences.



We will be watching both of these products, particularly with the boost that remote life has given to EdTech. So far 2021 has already seen 24 EdTech exits compared to 45 in all of 2019, according to Crunchbase. The scope is wide-reaching. For example, MasterClass achieved a $2.5 billion valuation last week for its adult learning content, and Quizlet and Kahoot! — new to the unicorn club as of 2020 — made their first acquisitions to expand capabilities, curriculum, and communities.

Then there’s Duolingo, which raised $35M on a $2.5B valuation in November. All of this has us wondering what its next move will be, after it finishes rolling out its expansion to Yiddish and toilet paper, of course.

While we speculate, learn a new mot (that’s “word” in French).

Hectacorn
NLP
RPA
GPT-3
Rorange (That’s Product Hunt's primary brand color)

There’s a product to help with your fluency in jargon, too. The makers of Whatis also launched their second iteration, which is basically a wiki built into Slack. The Whatis bot serves to manage and organize your team's terminology, jargon, project names, and acronyms. Check it out.