![]() ![]() Plus, there’s the language element: learners need opportunities to study family and relationship vocabulary! You mentioned diversity–how did you think about representation when creating these women, while also writing against stereotypes? I thought it was an important idea to depict in our world. But in other cultures, grandparents play a large role in raising children–especially in Asian cultures, I know a lot of people who were raised by grandparents. In American culture, depictions of nuclear families are more prominent. These make for fun storytelling opportunities! Lin and Lucy are one pair of related characters–why was it important to depict that grandmother-granddaughter relationship? You may notice a lot of our character pairings are like that! Zari is super outgoing, while her best friend Lily is super introverted Lin is really laid-back, but Bea is quite neurotic. In terms of group dynamics, there’s a lot of natural drama generated from opposites attracting. It was really important for us to have different ages, ethnicities, and personalities so that learners all over the world could relate to at least one character. What was the process for developing the group dynamic, from distinct personalities to varying ages? Any protagonist that wants things is easy to write for, because they experience a lot of struggles and they’re always putting themselves out there. She is honestly an easy character to write for because she wants things and she’s very ambitious. Which woman do you most enjoy writing for/building narrative for? ![]() Of course, we also wanted to make sure the names fit each character’s personality and were relatively easy to pronounce for all of our learners! There were a few other special considerations, like Lin and Lucy sharing an “L” name-we wanted to signify to learners that they were closely connected. For example, if you’re posting about a character on social media (“I’m such a Bea!”) you wouldn’t want it to be Bea in one language and Beth in another it would be hard to create the connection that it’s the same character.īecause of that, we had to do a lot of cross-referencing to make sure the names didn’t have weird meanings in any language while keeping them fairly close to the names we’d chosen in English. We wanted to keep the names pretty similar across languages for consistency. This was actually a lot more challenging than you might imagine. How did you go about naming these characters? She works with a lot of different content in the app, including Stories, and is one of the people who helped develop our World Characters! We asked Emily to talk a little bit more about the origin stories behind our favorite Duolingo women: Lily, Zari, Bea, Lin, and Lucy. Emily is a Creative Producer at Duolingo and has worked here for just over three years. But they didn’t just come out of nowhere!Įnter: Emily Chiu. You probably can’t imagine a lesson without Duolingo’s cast of characters, but they’re pretty new to the Duolingo universe! In a short time, though, they’ve become more than just characters–they’re friends and cheerleaders for learners around the world. ![]()
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