Never discount the resolve of the American spirit in the face of adversity — in this case, the determination to learn a little bit of Mandarin Chinese to make navigating the popular TikTok alternative RedNote a little bit easier.
Duolingo, the popular language learning app, revealed yesterday (Jan. 15) that it has seen a staggering 216 percent increase in people learning Chinese compared to this time last year. Why the sudden, massive bump? Possibly because this Sunday, Jan. 19, TikTok will be outlawed in the United States, and American users would apparently rather flock to another Chinese short-form video app, RedNote (known as as “Xiaohongshu” in China) — where the default user interface language is Chinese — than settle for whatever alternative Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube might try to offer.
Additional evidence that the looming TikTok ban might be driving this interest comes from the app analytics company Appfigures (via TechCrunch). They said downloads of the Duolingo app in the U.S. have shot up 36 percent on the App Store and Google Play since Jan. 3, pushing it to No. 22 on the company’s Top Apps list.
Duolingo has — as they’ve done in the past — leaned into the surge. The company shared a video on TikTok (watch while you still can) featuring their green bird mascot sitting in an airport and reciting a few Mandarin phrases for beginners, starting with: “Welcome TikTok refugee.”
RedNote has been around since 2013 and it’s garnered about 300 million monthly users with an interface that recalls TikTok and Pinterest, and also has live-streaming capabilities. Whether the app has any staying power in the U.S. in the longterm remains to be seen, though this surge in interest could prompt the company to make it more accessible to non-Chinese-speaking users (not that there’s anything wrong with learning a foreign language, even under the pettiest of circumstances).
That said, the whole Chinese-owned app thing could very well place RedNote in the same inevitable situation as TikTok. The law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden last spring forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets was reportedly meant to shield American social media users from the influence of the Chinese government and protect their personal data. Whether or not American users actually care about that, however, well — the evidence appears to be speaking for itself.
TikTok has been fighting this legislation, and last week their case landed before the Supreme Court. The justices, however, did not seem very sympathetic to the company and the court appears likely to side with the government and uphold all the lower court rulings that already went against the app. A ruling on the matter is expected to arrive this week, and incoming president Donald Trump — who previously signed an executive order threatening to ban TikTok in 2020 — is now asking the Court to let him “save” the app instead.