TikTok U.S. customers have been studying Chinese language on Duolingo in rising numbers amid their adoption of a Chinese language social app called RedNote forward of the TikTok ban. The U.S. regulation, scheduled to enter impact on January 19, unless halted by the Supreme Courtroom, will see TikTok faraway from U.S. app shops and can cease the app from performing on customers’ gadgets except they install a VPN client.
As a substitute of making an attempt to work across the ban, nonetheless, over 700 million TikTok users have shifted over to the social video platform RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu), prompting a stunning cultural change between the 2 international locations’ residents — to not point out fairly just a few requests for American customers to assist with Chinese language customers’ English homework.
Although some TikTok refugees have since struggled with technical problems when signing up for RedNote, and others instantly acquired booted for neighborhood violations, the intent of the transfer from one Chinese language-owned app to a different is supposed to ship a robust sign to the U.S. authorities and would-be TikTok rivals like Meta that there’s demand for the kind of social networking experiences that China creates and U.S. corporations have solely managed to mimic.
The transfer can be serving as one thing of a pulse examine as as to whether or not U.S. customers are apprehensive about Chinese language corporations accumulating their private knowledge for nefarious use — one of many key components that led to TikTok’s ban within the first place. (Because it seems, many usually are not, as this migration reveals.)
Nevertheless, as a result of Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu/RedNote is designed for a Chinese language viewers, the app’s default language is Mandarin Chinese language. That prompted a rise in U.S. customers of the Duolingo language-learning app to take a crash course in Mandarin.
According to Duolingo, the app has seen roughly 216% progress in new Mandarin studying within the U.S. in comparison with this time final 12 months, with a pointy spike in mid-January as RedNote’s adoption took off. As well as, the corporate stories that in its “How did you hear about us” survey that new customers are prompted to reply, it’s seeing a corresponding spike in individuals choosing “TikTok” as their response.
“Oh so NOW you’re studying mandarin,” the corporate joked in an X post on Tuesday. It additionally posted a video to TikTok selling the usage of its app for studying the Chinese language language. The brief video confirmed the corporate’s inexperienced owl mascot on the airport heading to China overlaid by textual content that stated “me as a result of I’d somewhat transfer to China & be taught Mandarin on Duolingo.” The video at present has north of half 1,000,000 likes. One other more moderen video centered on educating Mandarin phrases for “TikTok refugees” has over 620,000 likes.
Based on knowledge from app intelligence supplier Appfigures, client demand for Duolingo’s language studying programs has additionally affected the app’s set up base.
The agency stories Duolingo’s app noticed a 36% improve in U.S. downloads throughout the App Retailer and Google Play mixed as of January 3 — an early signal that customers could have tried out completely different Chinese language social apps earlier than the surge to affix RedNote hit later within the month.
Per week in the past, Duolingo was ranked within the 40s for Prime Apps (minus video games) and Prime General (together with video games). As of proper now, it’s No. 22 in Prime General and No. 20 in Prime Apps.
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