We've all used the words klutz, schmooze, mensch, nosh and tcotchke in our everyday conversations. But, do you know where they come from? They're all Yiddish!
Today, we are excited to welcome Myra Awodey, Senior Community Manager at Duolingo, to talk about the launch of Yiddish to the world's top language learning app.
Yiddish is a language used by Jewish people in central and eastern Europe before the Holocaust. It was originally a German dialect with words from Hebrew and several modern languages and is today spoken mainly in the U.S., Israel and Russia.
Find out why it was important to add Yiddish to Duolingo and how you can learn the language, too!
Transcription:
So good afternoon, everyone. Happy Monday, this is Audrey Russo. I am thrilled to be here today, I'm thrilled that our guests, hopefully you had a chance as you roll in, had a chance to hear a song called havin a gala. And we'll talk about a little bit about how that fits in as we bring our guests on the show in a moment. So like every day, we are doing business as usual, and bring together the community and today is no exception. And we're thrilled to have my rowdy who is here from Duolingo, we're going to talk about the launch of their 40th language, which is yes, but before we do that, I want to give a shout out to Huntington bank, I want to thank them for being our sponsors and believing in our work and pulling the community together and telling stories and shining the light on the incredible things that are happening right here at our footsteps. So thank you Huntington bank, and also 40 by 80. That's the longitude and latitude of Pittsburgh is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pittsburgh Technology Council, which is our charitable arm. And you'll be hearing more about our work and talent development as well apprenticeship programs in tech. So our passion is to make sure that we don't leave people behind. And we're making sure that we're creating an inclusive opportunity for all, as the tech ecosystem across Pittsburgh continues to proliferate. So I am now that we've muted your microphones. But if you want to dance to it, you know more than welcome to dance. And if you want to, you know talk in the background, that's fine, but we've muted your microphones. And we've allowed for a chat and the chat, Jonathan Kersting, who's here with us each and every day. He's vice president of all things marketing, and media and storytelling, he is going to be monitoring all that. So I want to thank everyone for joining us today. And I'm bringing up Myra. Howdy, and welcome to the show Myra. Thank you so much for being here. Good to be here.
Thanks, Audrey.
So let's talk a little bit before we jump into you know the language and get emotional and all that fun stuff. And just as a disclaimer for everyone to know, Jonathan knows a lot of Yiddish. He was raised in squirrel Hill and seem to have a lot of friends who embedded Yiddish into their language. And my mother who had passed was fluent in Yiddish in reading and writing. So I've been on Louise for many, many years to make sure that Yiddish is one of the languages and they've just did a launch a beta launch on April 6. And there's been a lot of news about this language all over the world. So we brought Myra on but before we talk a little bit about the language and all that I want everyone to just to get to know Myra. Her name is Mayra rowdy and welcome Myra. Thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you know lots about what you do at Duolingo. And a little bit about yourself your own journey.
I am a community manager at Duolingo but I actually started at Duolingo about 10 years ago as a German language specialist. So I grew up in Germany in the US My mom is German My dad is American. And I grew up bilingual I went to college and I studied environmental science and urban planning and and then this opportunity at Duolingo came up they needed a German language expert to create a German for English speakers course and an English for German speakers and the the mission of kind of making free language education available to everyone really inspired me so I came back just for a summer thinking hey, I'll I'll try this out. This is a cool startup. My family's in Pittsburgh, I love it here. And, um, yeah, 10 years later, it's it's just kind of ticking off. It's crazy. So I've worn a lot of different hats. I've played a lot of different roles at Duolingo starting out as a language expert learning how to use our tools to kind of create language courses on the app. And then over time, as there was this big outpouring of support from other language communities who wanted to help us create courses, I kind of became the liaison between the teams that were creating courses and our internal technology. Do teams that we're creating the tools to create those courses? So I've been most of the last couple of years I've been spending, helping helping people use Duolingo tools to create free language courses. And yeah, it's been, it's been a great ride and the Yiddish team has been, especially just engaging and, and fun to work with. And the response has just been so, so overwhelming, so much more than what we would have expected when we started out many years ago. So yeah, it's it's very exciting.
So here you are, that you've been there 10 years, your native pittsburgher Is that correct? So how did the language piece infuse itself into your own life and your own work,
um, I was studying German literature, in school, and I just I kind of was always drawn to language and, and literature and the humanities, but also the sciences. So I was trying to figure out how I could kind of do both. And after college, I actually went to Berlin, to start a master's program in urban planning, thinking that that would be a nice way to kind of bridge the gap between the two. So learn about the kind of latest German innovations and urban planning, sustainable design, Environmental Design, socially equitable kind of planning processes to stem the effects of gentrification. So so I was kind of in a different area when Duolingo opportunity came up, but I happen to just, you know, have the native German speaking background, and that's what they needed. So I kind of fell into it without this being the plan. It wasn't I didn't think that I would end up in tech. But But yeah, it was just, it was so interesting to work with all these people from different backgrounds, on this project that everyone really believed in with this, you know, global mission to kind of counteract the inequality that comes from different levels of access to education. And that was, I think, the driving force behind Luis our founders idea. And it's kind of been the common thread throughout and a big part of what has made the lingo so successful.
Yeah, it really is pretty true. So So do you use any of your academic background in terms of, you know, economic development or anything in terms of the work that you do? How does it play in there,
um, I use most mostly I don't, I use just my kind of German language skills, and then the experience from from 10 years of kind of being involved in building dual windows tools and watching Duolingo grow and thinking through all the problems that come up when you're working with global communities. But one thing I think that I've noticed over time, there are a lot of parallels. So I was obsessed with evolution in college, and I was studying environmental, like habitat fracturing and kind of endangered species. And so I was always fascinated with the parallels between language evolution, and, and sort of species evolution. And then the corollary to that is kind of what happens when something is vulnerable, or on the edge of going extinct? And what are the factors that can kind of help bring something back, or, or exacerbate those processes? So there's, there's a little bit of overlap, but other than
that you have the wide perspective probably brings a lot, a lot to the role. So you actually, let's just talk us one more point. You actually were at Duolingo at the onset? Yeah, it was long
before they even launched publicly. So it was right after. So Duolingo started as kind of a project by Luis went on and Sephora and hacker who were at Carnegie Mellon School of computer science. And before it's been out, or right after it's been out of CMU, we moved to Walnut Street, we had a little our member that space above jetters. Yep. And and that was when I started. So we were we were kind of scrambling to get a few basic courses up and running so that we could launch and then I was there for the launch. We went to New York and it was a really big exciting milestone, but we only launched with a few courses. We just had English for Spanish speakers, Spanish or English speakers, German, French, Italian and Portuguese. And we didn't even think that we would add that much. We kind of thought you know, these are the main ones we want to have a huge impact. So this is what we should focus on. So that was that was kind of interesting to go from that to them. hearing all of these people kind of come come out of the woodwork and say, Hey, what about this language? I want to learn this language or Hey, I want to help you teach this other language, figuring out how to open our tools up for that.
So what is the number one most used language from? From the origin of learning English?
Spanish, by far? Our second largest courses, actually, people learning English from Spanish. So Duolingo is really, really big in South America.
Okay, so bi directional. What's number two? You know what number two is?
That's a good question. I think it's French for English speakers. Um, and then sometimes they switch so so it's like French, German, and Portuguese are kind of the vying for
third place. And then the the interesting sort of outlier that has become fascinating as gaillac. Right, is something that's interesting, that was that no one expected about gaillac.
There are a few languages that are maybe considered minoritized or vulnerable. So one of the first ones that we started to teach just kind of on a whim, because we had a very passionate high schooler reached out to us was Irish Gaelic. And this, this kid was learning Irish Gaelic in school. And there's a big revival movement in Ireland. And he was, he was just so passionate that Louie said, Okay, let's give it a try. And, you know, within just a year of kind of publishing this Irish course, there were more Irish learners on Duolingo, then there were native speakers. So that kind of gave us a signal that we had, we had something pretty powerful. And that's not to say that Duolingo is gonna, like bring back right, single handedly, but that it's, it's, you know, kind of like a time capsule, um, but not only that, also a way to continue to teach these languages and make them accessible to people who maybe don't have in person access to native speakers. So after the Irish course, we kind of realized we do also have a responsibility to smaller languages, especially given today when everyone's learning English and Spanish, you know, what are what are the effects of that across linguistic diversity? And so then we, we also got involved with Welsh, Scottish Gaelic. We recently started teaching Hawaiian, Navajo. We're working on Shin Creel course. And
what else? Anything about Ronnie?
Yeah, a lot of kind of interesting, more niche languages. And then we also have some, what are called con languages, constructed languages. So we have Esperanto, as well as high valerian and cling on. So those are fun. Fun projects, too.
Yeah, it's fun. So let's, so let's talk about Yiddish. And Lenore bloom is on here. And she said that, um, you know, she's been a mentor of Louise's, her and her husband for a while, but they started out as a project Olympus probe at CMU. So it's pretty funny. And then we worked really hard. Lenore did to keep Louise in Pittsburgh, so and then how popular is Arabic real quick. And then I want to get into talking about Yiddish.
And let me look up what our numbers are on that. But Arabic is very popular. We also had an interesting kind of spike in people who wanted to learn Arabic from European languages. So during the crisis, we started Arabic for Swedish speakers and Arabic for German speakers. And that was, I think that was a really big kind of push to put Duolingo, you know, in the hands of people where it would really make a big difference. Let's see Arabic for English speakers has about 3.1 million active learners. Wow.
So how many new people sign up a day? Just in general?
That's a good question. I actually don't know I'm sure it's like hundreds of 1000s a lot of people sign up and then kind of only do a couple lessons and then they fall off and then maybe they come back a month or two later. So what we hear a lot is Oh, yeah, I have Duolingo on my phone. I really like it. I'm not using it as much as I should. But, um, but you know, eventually you come back around so it works out.
So let's let's talk a little bit about Yes, because that's that was the original reason. So there. There are three main dialects actually yet if they're called lit facts, Northern munitions. spoken in Lithuania, Belarus and Latvia, and then galaxy honor or central Yiddish, and that I believe came from Poland or parts of Hungary. And then southeastern Yiddish, which is spoken in Romania, and Ukraine, even though there aren't a lot of Jews there, that's still a language. And, you know, which is often considered like a compromise dialect. I mean, we see that in the United States as well. So southeastern Yiddish is a form of the language most depicted in Yiddish theatre and music film, and probably what people like Jonathan and I and other people in Pittsburgh, who are Jewish are familiar with, in terms of, you know, the language. And this is a language that has been shrinking over the years, I would say, at least over the 75 years, maybe, if not longer. Why did you want to provide the software? And can you go back in time and tell us why Yes, I mean, I personally was bugging Luis for about five years. But I want to know the real reason because it had nothing to do with me bugging him.
It may have we did start building it about five years ago. But honestly, it was it was kind of a response to the the volume and the quality of interest that we were getting both to learn and to teach the language. So when we decide to teach a new language course, we usually look at three things. We look at how big the impact will be. So that's usually how many people are interested in it. But it could also be, you know, how critically endangered is the language? How well suited is Duolingo to teach the language. So from a technical perspective, do we have the abilities to handle the writing system are we going to be able to grade the input of users is written in a standard kind of Unicode kind of text. A lot of languages just haven't been standardized to that extent, and we can't teach them because of that. And then the third reason, the third kind of factor that we look at is the quality of contributors who would want to get involved and it was just really high, we had a lot of people from the Yiddish book center, and kind of get a schists, and scholars who were really into this cause. And over time, the team changed. So we kind of got some people who started five years ago, and then they got busy, because they were leaders in their communities and educators doing a ton of other stuff. And then we had a different constellation of people. But throughout there were people who are kind of experts in the field, not just casual, yet. It's just who really felt strongly about teaching English, and they had a background and how to create the curriculum. So when we have that opportunity to work with, you know, world class leaders in the language revitalization movement, it just seemed too good to pass up. So, so we started the course about five years ago. It has changed a lot since the early days. And it's actually gone through a couple different iterations, deciding which dialect to teach what the audio should should sound like. And even things like should we use the Hebrew script? Or should it be the the kind of phonetic pronunciation in the Latin nice script? So there were there were kind of a lot of different iterations over time, both of the team and the content and kind of the perspective of the course.
So who had wasn't there, like different communities that you actually became immersed in? Were any of them in New York? Were they like in the Brooklyn community in the Orthodox community?
Exactly. We did. We did have a lot of Yiddish speakers from the Brooklyn community who are working on this and then it kind of became an interesting hybrid. So mina viswanatha is a prominent she's from a prominent nutritionist family, she's actually an engineer herself. But But you know, her mom recently published the new Yiddish dictionary, her brother completed Harry Potter and to get a surefire was kind of groundbreaking, in terms of like secular academic standardization and evil was kind of her approach. So So marrying the standardized written format, with the colloquial pronunciations from the Brooklyn community was kind of a result of the people that were already working on the course talking to each other, going back and forth and trying to figure out what would be kind of the most useful to the most number of people and what would be kind of the most appropriate and the way Mina puts it is You know, she, she knew that no matter what they did, they were gonna, they were gonna make some people angry. So they didn't have the pressure of making the perfect decision because every decision was going to be flawed in some ways. So that's how they ended up with that.
So actually, they're, you know, it's guinnesses actually uses Hebrew letters. So, you know, people like Jonathan and I, and my mother used to say that this is sloppy. We just want to speak in Yiddish. Yeah, eight, we don't want to write in Yiddish, we just want to have a conversation. And yes, and so I know, by going through the beta, I have to like, sort of beef up on my whole alphabet. And I would imagine that that probably caused a lot of interesting conversations around the integrity of the language. And the people like Jonathan and I, who just want to use those words and talk and talk in a way and not use the alphabet. Do you see that with other languages as well, like when people get together that they just sort of want to speak it, and not necessarily have to go through and learn the alphabet?
Yeah, I think that's a kind of decision that we often have to make when there's a different script. And there's there two variants of the language, there's one, you know, in the, the kind of formalized alphabet, and then there's one that's just kind of spelled phonetically. And we got a lot of people saying, you guys are doing this all wrong. Americans don't want to do it with the, with the script that they already know. And that's a fair point. You know, I think we could also in the future offer another course, maybe that just focuses on on the speaking and listening component, and maybe doesn't have that extra hurdle of learning a new script. But, you know, we wanted to kind of start out with, with all the tools and bells and whistles that we had. And we had worked really hard on creating these, what we call character challenges in order to teach Asian languages. So we did have, you know, several years there where we were testing, how do you teach a new write writing script on an app, because it's just a unique challenge. And then when we had this breakthrough, and we were able to teach Mandarin and Japanese and Korean, we thought, you know, why not? This seems like a cool challenge to try. So that's, that's why they did it that way. But I'm sure in the future, you could make an argument for, for, you know, an additional Yiddish course that either focuses on a different dialect or different writing system.
So Jonathan, there's some questions out there a comment you want to grab some of them. Meyer, thanks for joining
us today. Love the conversation. We're all huge fans of Duolingo that is for sure. So we have a question from that said, asks, um, how popular is Duolingo? for schools do minority languages like Yiddish, CDs engagement on the platform? Or is it mostly individuals pursuing study on their own?
That's a great question. It's, I think it's kind of changing right now. So Duolingo, for schools, for those who don't know, is a part of Duolingo. It's a platform that teachers can use with their students to track student progress, create assignments, kind of create an overview of what their classes strengths and weaknesses are. And we've seen them used in a lot of different ways. We actually did a lot of outreach locally, we went into the Obama Academy and Bashir and Perry. And, and kind of watched teachers using technology in language classes and using Duolingo, specifically in language classes to learn how we could best support them. And teachers have found that Duolingo is really useful as a study tool that that kids can kind of students can use on their own either during summer break, or for extra credit. Sometimes they use it in class. So if there are 10 minutes extra at the end of class, then everyone just does their Duolingo. And the teacher kind of has extra time to focus on the students who need more attention. And the ones who are kind of more advanced are able to have something more challenging to work on because Duolingo is so personalized. So I think Duolingo for schools has a lot of promise. It's very popular. Right now, more language teachers are aware of Duolingo just on its own, and not a lot of language teachers know about Duolingo for schools. So that's the challenge is to kind of figure out, you know, where's that sweet spot where can Duolingo add the most value for teachers in either high school classroom setting or even college graduate kind of setting.
Very cool and Eric King once said, He says he noticed that Duolingo is looking to expand its data science and analytics competence. See, what's what's driving that?
Yeah, we have a lot of data, as you can imagine. And we know, there's a lot of potential I think for for research and learning science and language acquisition. And our teams are always publishing new insights about how the brain learns, and how the brain accesses, vocabulary and grammar concepts and how best to teach language. And we have this really kind of elegant back end system under the hood. So Duolingo looks very simple and gamified. But um, but the kind of AI that's happening to, to serve up the content to the learners is actually very sophisticated. And we, we think a lot about spaced repetition, we think a lot about different styles of learning. So some people you know, maybe have more trouble learning how to listen, or how to speak or how to write than others. And so coming up with algorithms that kind of tailor the Duolingo experience to the individual learner so that when you're spending time on Duolingo, you're actually really making the most of that time has been just incredibly powerful. And so now we're seeing studies that, you know, you can, you can spend
something like
three months on Duolingo, doing a couple of minutes a day, and you'll, you'll be able to cover about as much as for high school or for college semesters of a language course. So, so kind of figuring out how to make the most of that time when you're studying on Duolingo by yourself. It might not get you fluent without actually having a person to speak to but like, how can we make the best use of that time and that technology?
So yeah, Ellie Gordon just gives you a shout out, you can read it, just saying COVID, who works into a lingo taught her Yiddish classes, and it was great. So now that she knows how to write it, Jonathan, maybe we need to ask Ellie about that. I will speak it. But yeah, the initiatives are just phenomenal. So can use like
occasional words from time to time.
So can you speak Yiddish at all? Can you say something to us?
Um, I can't I think I could probably order a bagel because that was our last
Yeah,
it was like Phil and bagel Mitch near. But it's really my, my Yiddish would probably just be a sort of German, German get a sheis kind of combination. So I can understand when when people are speaking Yiddish, and I can kind of decipher it if it were written phonetically, but I don't
I'm going over this. Um, you know what that means? gushing, absolutely gushing over this. And in some ways, I'm a little verklempt. You know? So Jonathan, what does that mean?
I'd be thinking about this. But I know you're all choked up,
choked up, I'm choked up for a lot of reasons. And so how excited has the Pittsburgh community been? Because I know there is a group that actually is that meets regularly, how engaged have they been in all this?
We've,
I mean, I think everyone has has been just really excited. We've been getting a lot of feedback, of course, from all of my, my friends and family and mother in laws are sending us, you know, all kinds of things like missing except translations. So one interesting thing about a Duolingo course is that when it launches, it launches into beta, which means that it's not perfect. And we actually rely on the numbers of users to really Polish things over time. So we, we want 1000s and 1000s of people to tell us, hey, you know, there's, you could do a better recording here, or you're missing an answer that should have been accepted here. And it takes a couple months for the course to kind of what we call stabilized. So right now, if you take the Duolingo Yiddish course and you submit feedback, what you can do from within the app, you're actually helping us improve the course. And you're giving the team feedback so that it has a signal if it wants to iterate on the course in the future and expand it and make it better. So that's that's kind of a big part of it is this early adopter community giving us feedback about it? And of course, some people have very strong opinions and they they don't like the decisions that we've made and that's that's their their right but you know, all of The feedback in aggregate is super valuable for us. And that kind of tells us what we should be doing differently.
And that's what Louise and semoran have built their companies on, always on iterative feedback. I mean, even with reCAPTCHA, everything's been based on input, and then, you know, continuous improvement. Obviously, now with AI, you know, we can do that, you know, a lot faster. So, how do you know how many people are using the internet right now? Have they signed up to have any info? I believe
we have 208,000 active learners. Oh, wait, that's a lot of walking out a couple of weeks. That's really amazing.
I'm
done have probably stuck with it. A lot of people have died. Right? Let's try it out. But still, it's it's it's a lot. And I don't know what the what the number of native speakers is. But it's Mina said that it was they were close or something. So it's, that's kind of amazing.
Amazing, because I think that there were really considered like six or 700 people that actually still speak English. So that's pretty significant. When you think about that.
Yeah. And I think it's just, you know, a lot of people reconnecting maybe with their heritage and the diaspora, but then I think there are also people who are just kind of linguistically interested in it. And just as a, as a cool language to learn for polyglots, too. So it's an interesting mix of users.
Great, Myra, I can't thank you enough. Myra outtie. She has been doing Lyft for 10 years, doing a lot of interesting things and including community outreach as as it relates to language and engagement. This has been a treat to have you on the show. I know that we kicked off with me playing havanna Gila, and some of you who don't know that you can go to YouTube and listen to that. There's also strong Yiddish theater that is a was alive and well pre COVID. But hopefully that will be resurrected in the near future. So right in our footsteps came out at Carnegie Mellon project Olympus, and is a massive company right here, doing amazing things and my Are you lucky have been there for a decade. So I want to thank everyone. We'll see you tomorrow, same time. Stay safe, everyone. Remember get vaccinated.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai