Unless there’s a dramatic turn of events over the next couple of days, TikTok is going to be banned in the US from January 19. Thankfully, there are some decent alternatives available, but you may need to brush up on your Chinese in order to use one of them.
Suddenly, More People Are Learning Chinese on Duolingo
According to Duolingo’s post on X (embedded below), there has been a sudden spike in the number of Americans learning Chinese.
In fact, the popular language-learning app has witnessed around a 216% growth in new Chinese (Mandarin) learners in the US at the start of 2025 compared to the same time a year ago.
There could be a number of different explanations for this. For example, with corporations spanning continents these days, people in the US could have colleagues in China that they meet with regularly on Zoom. So, what better way to impress than by learning some Mandarin?
However, given the specific timing of this spike in people learning how to speak Chinese, there is a more obvious explanation…
Is the Looming TikTok Ban Fueling The Rise of Mandarin?
In April 2024, US President Joe Biden gave TikTok owner ByteDance nine months to sell up or face a countrywide ban. And with the January 19, 2025, deadline fast approaching, ByteDance is holding firm.
There have been suggestions that ByteDance would be willing to sell TikTok to Elon Musk to avoid the ban. However, that report was soon shot down, and nothing has yet been officially announced.
In the meantime, disgruntled TikTok users in the US are hedging their bets by exploring other Chinese apps that could replace TikTok. The front-runner being a Chinese social media app called RedNote (or Xiaohongshu in Chinese), which stands for “Little Red Book”.
However, RedNote’s default language is Mandarin, and the majority of its users are Chinese. Which may indeed explain the sudden rise in the number of people seeking to learn Chinese on Duolingo for the first time.
For their part, RedNote users are making the most of this sudden interest, with “TikTok refugees” being a trending phrase across the app. And some videos are even teaching Americans moving across to RedNote how to say “TikTok refugees” in Mandarin.
