200 million times a day. Okay, that's all your fault. You made that happen.
Hello and welcome to Talk Chinese Z, where we teach you Chinese with ease. My name is Xiaolan. I'm going to teach you a useful phrase of Chinese every day. In this episode, we're going to learn something very important because that's exactly what we are doing, something called language in Chinese. We have a special guest who is the most qualified person to talk about this subject because his company, Duolingo, has 120 million people using it to learn a new language on a regular basis. We have Luis von Ahn. Hi Luis, how are you?
Hi. Thank you for having me. Ni hao.
Ni hao. Luis, I know you have a fascinating story and that was probably from a couple years ago when you started something, a really cool project called CAPTCHA. Can you just share with us a little bit about it?
Sure. A few years ago I was one of the two people who invented this thing called CAPTCHA, which are these distorted characters that you have to type all over the internet. Whenever you're buying tickets on Ticketmaster, for example, you have to type these annoying distorted characters. I helped invent that.
Mhm. And it's now used by, you know, essentially every website in the world, every major website in the world. Mhm. After that, I, um, you know, I've worked on many other things. I'm a computer science professor.
Right. The original CAPTCHA was in the year 2000. Then later in about 2007, I invented another form of a CAPTCHA called reCAPTCHA. Those distorted characters, the reason you have to type them is to make sure that you're a human and not a computer program that was written to, for example, submit the form or buy tickets, kind of millions of tickets two at a time. And it works because humans can read these distorted characters, but computers cannot. Now the reCAPTCHA version, which is the later one, that one, the idea is that it kind of kills two birds with one stone. It solves two problems at once where as people are typing the CAPTCHAs, they're not only authenticating themselves as a human, but they're also helping to digitize books. And that's the idea with reCAPTCHA. So that, you know, nowadays when you type a CAPTCHA, the words that you're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized and that the computer could not recognize and we're getting people to recognize them for us while they type those.
So how many CAPTCHAs or reCAPTCHAs have now been typed in every day?
It's about 200 million times a day somebody types one of these.
200 million times a day. Okay, that's all your fault. You made that happen. Okay. I apologize a lot. Okay. I remember I listened to your TED Talk that was done I think that was 2011. And you at that time you said, 'Oh, we had the experiment about something called Duolingo. Come to our test site and beta site. Going to be launched in a few months.' And then a couple years on, you have 120 million people learning through your platform. This is incredible achievement.
Yeah, thank you. So we launched in about 2012. And it's a way to learn languages. I mean, it's an app or there's a website at duolingo.com. And we started and right now we're the most popular way to learn languages in the world. Unfortunately, we don't yet teach Chinese.
Can we help? Can we help?
Yeah, we would love that.
I mean, I think the biggest problem we have is we just don't have a great way to teach the character system.
I have that. I know. I know. So I think that's something I mean, I would love to do that. Chinese is the second most requested language of the ones that we do not have.
It's so important to learn a new language and then say language in Chinese, we say yuyan. Yuyan. Yu, that means to say the word, the language itself, and yan is just to say something, to speak out. So, yu is third tone, yan is the second tone. So, Luis, do you want to say it with me?
