It's a big world out there.

Billions of us trying to live, love, prosper,

and make sense of our brief time on this planet.

Since the dawn of humanity, we've been passing

information from one person to another through

a common language.

Unfortunately, you can't communicate with others

without knowing or learning their language first.

A similar issue is manifested on the web where

text can be penned in dozens of different languages,

each of which demands a reader's fluency.

We've developed an elegant solution to both

problems -- a way for you to learn a language for

free, while at the same time helping to translate

text from the web, enabling a wealth of

language-shackled information to be liberated for

all of humanity. It's called "duolingo".

Here's how it works: Let's say you're a native

English speaker who wants to learn Spanish.

We start by giving you a sentence from a Spanish

web site and asking you to translate it.

Wait. Back up.

How can you translate a language you don't know?

First, duolingo only gives you sentences that fit

your language level. Beginners get the really simple

sentences from the web and advanced users get the

more complex ones.

This way, everybody becomes a valuable translator.

And second, if you're really lost, you can always

see possible translations for words you don't know.

Afterwards, duolingo helps you understand and

memorize the words you hovered over through

educational examples.

You can also vote on the quality of other students'

translations, which helps you learn by seeing how

others translated the same sentence.

And because you create valuable translations while

you learn, we return the favor by offering duolingo

completely free of charge: no ads, no hidden fees,

no subscriptions. Just free.

To put the potential benefit of duolingo into

perspective, think about this: if one million

people would use duolingo to learn, the entirety

of English Wikipedia could be translated to Spanish

in just 80 hours.

Duolingo: Learn a language while translating the web.