This freebie has given the Tinder (opens in new tab) membership a little boost. According to the company itself, there was a 25% increase in the number of successful matches made in the first week of April alone. However, 76% of Passport users are matching with people who speak a different language to them. Enter some uncomfortable chats, where remarks can quickly become lost in translation. In an effort to combat this, the matchmaking company has teamed up with Duolingo (opens in new tab) to give 100,000 members a free month of Duolingo Plus. This could come in fairly handy for learners, as the top-spoken languages are all taught by the owl-fronted app. Although Duolingo didn’t top our lists of the best learn Spanish online (opens in new tab) courses and best learn French online (opens in new tab) apps, it still ranked fairly high. (The top spot, in our opinion, clearly belongs to Rosetta Stone (opens in new tab).) As such, anyone who can get their hands on a free subscription package would still be getting a good language-learning boost. Interestingly, the research showed that Americans were very keen to use the app to speak to people from other countries. It’s the country doing the most swiping on users based in both Paris and Tokyo. After English, Spanish and French, the most commonly spoken languages on Tinder Passport are Japanese, Catalan, Korean, Italian, German, Dutch and Portuguese.
Online video dating during the pandemic
A lot of the best online dating sites (opens in new tab) have introduced video dating over the past year, as people haven’t been able to meet in-person. Popular dating site Match.com (opens in new tab) introduced something called Vibe Check, a new easy video feature, and eHarmony (opens in new tab) launched Video Dates too. According to research from Match, those video dates have become crucial to the whole dating process. In a big survey of US-based singles, 68% of people said they used video dates to check if they would want to meet in real life and 59% said they have more meaningful chats via video. Unfortunately, chatting via video didn’t take away the first date nerves for a lot of users, as 58% of singles said they found the process awkward.
