Kwiziq Learning Speed Survey 2019 - Wow!

I confess, I was nervous about repeating Kwiziq’s 2016 Language Learning Speed Survey. We’ve changed, grown and added Spanish. What if the survey contradicted our amazing 2016 results?

We asked our users in 2019 the same questions:

The results astounded us!

Back in 2016, we hadn’t really expected anyone to tick the “6x to 10x faster” box. We were amazed that 5% of users had done so and even more so that 19% reported learning 3x-5x faster, meaning that a quarter of students reported learning from 3x to 10x faster! Incredibly, ALL respondents said they learned faster.

2% had answered “No/Not Sure” but had commented that they did feel they were learning faster, they just didn’t want to put a figure on how much faster. Fair comment, we thought, it’s not science. It was never intended to be. Nonetheless, how people feel about their learning speed is still incredibly important and valuable data.

We had five times as many respondents this time round, so I’d been expecting poorer stats even though the product had improved radically. You can see why I’d been nervous about repeating the survey.

My heart sank when I first looked at the 2019 stats. The first thing I saw was that the “No/Not Sure” category had risen to 9%.

Then I saw the other categories and sat back in my chair. Wow! Overall, the stats were actually better.

9 out of 10 Kwiziq users report learning French and Spanish faster.
Nearly 40% say they learn 3x to 10x faster and more than 50% report learning 50% to twice as fast.

The 6x-to-10x category had risen to 13% and the 3x-to-5x category had also risen to 24%.

Nearly 40% of Kwiziq users reported learning speed increases of between 3 times and 10 times faster! More than 50% of Kwiziq users reported learning 1.5 times to twice as fast.

So, why did the “No, Not Sure” category grow by 7%? Well, that’s fascinating to analyse:

If we group the top two categories (group A) and the bottom two (group B) and consider “no/not sure” as a third category (C), we see that 13% of the group B moved up into the faster group A.

This delighted us: it confirmed that our improvements were genuinely working for users.

On the downside, 7% of the group B moved down into C (“No/Not Sure”) category. The survey also had a comments field so that users could give us feedback and explain their responses.

Of course, I went straight the “No”s to see what went wrong, but reading through them I was gobsmacked. The majority of those respondents had simply been reluctant to put a figure on their learning speed increases.

Next time, we’ll separate that answer into two distinct answers. 😉

Full Transparency

I’m always impressed when I read blogs by companies that are brave enough to be fully transparent with their stats and feedback – the good, the bad and the ugly. We want to be that kind of company.

We’re incredibly proud of all the glowing feedback we get from users saying Kwiziq is the best product for learning languages, but that’s a curated list of the good stuff. What about the negative comments?

We’ve decided this year to post all of the feedback that users gave us in the speed survey, whether good or bad. We’ve learned so much from reading these comments that we want you to know, we’re listening. We love feedback, good or bad. It helps us continue to make the best software for language learning in the world.

2019 Speed Survey User Comments

Summary and responses

Response Comments
6X to 10X Faster 56
3X to 5X Faster 81
2X Faster 87
1.5X Faster 71
No / Not Sure 40
Total 335

Footnotes: some comments have been edited for clarity. Occasional references to Kwiziq’s education partners’ brand names have been replaced with simply “Kwiziq” to avoid confusion. A small number of comments containing personal user information were not published here in order to protect the user even though the comments are anonymised.

Author info

Gruff Davies

[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.

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