Data Insight: Chinese and Americans are most passionate language learners

Donald Trump’s conservative approach didn’t block Americans’ passion to explore overseas. National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report shows more than 10.6 million US students ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade are now studying a foreign language, making up to 20% of US school population.

Spanish remains the most popular language due to geological relativity. French and German continue to rank the second and the third places whereas Mandarin rose to become the fastest growing language in the U.S. with 227, 086 students currently registered for learning.
Center for Immigration Studies shows that one in five Americans today speaks a language other than English. Foreign-language-speaking population are heavily concentrated in larger cities like D.C. and New York City. Fastest growing regions include tourism-heavy areas like Nevada.
Despite rapid development of AI translation, foreign language education market has been growing globally in an unprecedented pace. Market size of global language services reached 43.08 billion in 2017, and this number is expected to exceed 56 billion by 2021, according to nationwide research.
AppBi analyzed two most popular language Apps (Duolingo & HelloTalk) in China and the U.S. iOS market and extracted following insights.

Duolingo vs. HelloTalk

Duolingo is U.S. most popular language learning App with more than 300 million registered users. HelloTalk is launched in Shenzhen, China in 2017 connecting language learners with native speakers. Both Apps are leading the market in their regions.


AppBi: Chinese and Americans are more willing to learn new languages

AppBi data shows that the Top 2 countries in App downloads are China and the U.S. Both countries today experienced exponential growth in language learners. While English is the dominant second language in China, the U.S. learners are more interested in Spanish.

AppBi: Americans prefer to curriculums whereas Chinese seek social networking
HelloTalk dominates the Asian market and Duolingo has absolute advantage in North America and Europe. Europe, traditionally strong in mastering multiple languages, contribute an essential portion of Duolingo’s user base. Countries like German, Italy, Spain, and Russia are all top users of Duolingo.
AppBi finds users in Asia are more interested in social networking with native speakers whereas the U.S. and European users prefer to curriculum-based learning. Apps like Hellotalk with a function of social are more popular in countries like China, Japan, and Korea.


AppBi: Mobile Users are more willing to learn on iPhone than tabloids
AppBi data shows that users today are more willing to use iPhone to study languages. Instead of heavy planning and scheduling, users often take fragments of time to study. Tabloids and Web are not as popular as iPhone when comes to language learning.
AppBi: Game related search keywords are more appealing to users
Top search words in Education Category shows game-related keywords are more popular to learners. For instance, many are seeking words modified from “quiz” and “words”. Top educational Apps are often connected to traditionally popular games such as Scrabble and Quizlet.

When selecting bidding keywords for Search Ads, understanding the true nature of the Apps can be crucial. Top bidding keywords related to Duolingo are “quiz”, “google classroom”, and “khan academy” whereas HelloTalk are often associated with “best friends”.


AppBi: Downloads might be a determinant for revenue

While many Apps’ profits are not relevant to the number of downloads, AppBi study finds a correlation between numbers of downloads and final revenue. The connection between downloads and revenue are more obvious in iPhone than in tabloids.

AppBi
AppBi data derives from 5 million applications’ monitoring and 8 million ad keywords’ tracking. The real-time and multi-dimensional data analysis provides the most precise and accurate ASM advertising services for Search Ads advertisers. To get more information from ASM data, welcome to access AppBi Intelligent Advertising data analysis platform.