Jozef Markovic @Dodulik: "Do you speak English? Sprechen..."

Slovakia

Do you speak English? Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Since you are reading this post, I guess you do. I have been learning English since I was 10 years old. It has been a long journey, and I still remember the very first textbook we used at school. Vocabulary. Pronunciation. Grammar. Homework. And then… repeat. At the beginning of every class, we would also listen to an English song. Back then, learning a language felt like studying. But can it be done differently? Apparently, yes. A few years ago, I visited my parents and heard some strange noises coming from the back office. “What are those sounds?” I asked my mother. “Duolingo,” she replied. “What?” “Your father is learning English.” My father was already close to 70 at the time. He is a successful doctor and has always enjoyed studying, but foreign languages were never really his thing. Yet there he was, sitting in front of his phone, practising English on Duolingo. And he still does it today. Almost every time I visit my parents, I hear those familiar sounds coming from the office. That got me thinking. If an app can keep a man close to 70 engaged in learning a foreign language for years, perhaps there is more to Duolingo than just language lessons. So I started looking at the company differently. Not as a language-learning app. As a business. And that is where it gets interesting. Duolingo has turned learning into a habit. Short lessons, streaks, rewards, notifications and constant feedback make the experience feel more like a game than studying. And habits are powerful. I am sure many of us have read Atomic Habits. One of the most important ideas from the book is that small actions, repeated consistently, can lead to remarkable results. Duolingo seems to have built its entire business around that principle. From an investor's perspective, I like that. The company isn't simply selling language courses. It has created a global consumer platform built around engagement, learning and recurring usage. My father may have been my first Duolingo use case. The financial results made me look twice. And sometimes, the best investment ideas don't start with a spreadsheet. Sometimes they start with strange noises coming from your parents' study. Keep studying. Keep learning new things. Keep investing. Happy investing, everybody! Greetings, Dodulik. The results of my investment journey are displayed in the chart below. Past performance does not guarantee future results. $DUOL (Duolingo) $SPY (State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF) $QQQ (Invesco QQQ)

Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.

3 Mentioned

DUOL

Duolingo

SPY

State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF

QQQ

Invesco QQQ

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