Tinder Partners with Duolingo to Offer Language Lessons

Tinder has announced a partnership with language learning platform Duolingo to offer lessons to its users and bridge the language barrier gap for long-distance dates.

The Match Group dating app has offered to give 100,000 users a free month of Duolingo Plus, an online service which offers lessons in multiple languages. According to Tinder, 76 percent of its users who wanted to match with people from other countries found that they were matching with dates who spoke languages other than their own, a barrier to connection. Tinder saw an opportunity to help them with Duolingo.

The pandemic has motivated singles to look outside their own city, or even country, for a date, thanks to the popularity of virtual dating.

Tinder’s Passport feature, which allows its members to date people anywhere in the world regardless of location, has been especially popular this past year. In April, the dating app offered it for free to all of its users. The company debuted this offer in April 2020 when lockdowns from the pandemic began and people were interested in expanding their options and dating people who didn’t live close by, but now, the interest in Passport has remained strong even as people are getting vaccinated and meeting in person.

Image: Tinder

According to Tinder, English is the number one language people are interested in learning, mostly to connect with U.S. users. And while twenty percent of Brazilian Passport users are connecting with people in the U.S. and want to learn more English, U.S. residents have the most Passport dates with those living in Paris and Tokyo, and respectively want to learn some French and Japanese. 

Spanish lessons are also very popular among Tinder users, with Madrid being the fifth most popular destination for Passport daters. Rome is the tenth most popular city on Passport, according to Tinder’s data.

Duolingo offers 100 courses in 40 different languages, including those listed above as well as Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, and Catalan, which were languages of other popular destinations for Passport daters. Tinder has advised its users to ditch the popular Google translate and instead challenge themselves to learn at least a few phrases of a new language to connect better with long-distance dates.

“Passport is one of our most popular paid features and since it’s been free we’ve had our busiest day of 2021,” said Udi Milo, VP Product, Tinder. “In the first week alone there was a 25% increase in the number of matches made as a result of the feature, so a partnership with Duolingo will help our members spark conversations easily, no translation needed.”

For more on this dating service you can check out our Tinder review.