Name: How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media | Duolingo's Luis Von Ahn | TED
Uploaded: 2025-01-16T13:30:18.000Z
Duration: 12 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Also, that is not where they keep the prisoners.

That is called Guantanamo, not the same place.

So Guatemala is right below Mexico, and for the Americans in the audience, and let this sink in because it really applies in most ways.

For the Americans in the audience, you can think of it as Mexico's Mexico.

Just like the U.S. doesn't want illegal immigration from Mexico, Mexico doesn't want illegal immigration from Guatemala.

It's a smaller country, it's a poorer country, and, well, what can I tell you, it has much better Mexican food.

Guatemala is a very poor country, and a lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes.

But I always saw it as the opposite, as something that brings inequality, because what happens in practice is that people who have a lot of money can buy themselves a really good education and therefore continue having a lot of money, whereas people who don't have very much money barely learn how to read and write, and therefore never make a lot of money, and this is especially true in poor countries.

Now, I was fortunate that I received a rich person's education, even though I didn't grow up rich, and it's because I'm an only child.

And my mother, who was a single mother, spent all of her resources on my education, and this allowed me to come to college to the U.S. and eventually get a Ph.D. in computer science.

Now, because of all of this, about 10 years ago, I decided that I wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everyone.

Oh, by the way, this is what I want to talk to you about today, giving equal access to education to everyone.

At the time, I was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and I decided to work on this with my Ph.D. student Severin.

The way my brain works, all of education is just too general of a problem.

So I decided, let's start by teaching one thing, and then I started thinking, OK, well, what should we teach first?

Me and my co-founder, we both love math, and, you know, we didn't decide to do math.

Then we started thinking, well, maybe we should teach computer science.

But eventually, and this may be surprising to people in North America, eventually we decided that the best subject to start with was teaching foreign languages.

One of them is that there's a huge audience for it.

There's about two billion people in the world learning a foreign language, both in school and outside of schools.

Most of these people, by the way, are learning English.

About 80 percent of them are learning English.

In this weird map right here, all the countries in green are countries in which people are predominantly learning English.

And the reason for that is because English can truly transform your life.

In most countries in the world, knowledge of English can significantly increase your income potential.

So this is another reason why we decided to start with foreign languages, and it's because you can directly make more money if you learn another language, in particular, English.

And see, this is pretty different than many other subjects.

In the case of math, just knowledge of math does not increase your income potential, because usually you have to learn math to then learn physics to then become a civil engineer, like that's how you make more money, whereas with languages, if you were a waiter and you learned English, now you can be a waiter at a hotel and make more money.

So we decided, well, let's get started by teaching languages.

Now we also convinced ourselves that the only way to really reach a lot of people was by using a mobile phone or a smartphone in particular.

See, building schools all over the world is simply too expensive.

On the other hand, most of the world's population already has access to a smartphone, and the trend is that that fraction is only going to increase.

So we decided at the time that we would make a way to learn foreign languages on a mobile phone that was accessible to everyone, and then we called it Duolingo.

Now, in order to truly be accessible to everyone, rich and poor, Duolingo uses a freemium model to support itself.

What that means is that you can learn as much as you want without ever having to pay, but if you don't pay, you may have to see an ad at the end of a lesson.

Now if you don't like ads, you can also pay to subscribe to turn off the ads.

And it turns out that the vast majority of the revenue for Duolingo comes from people who pay to subscribe to turn off the ads.

Now who are these people who pay to subscribe to turn off the ads?

Well, they're usually people, well-off people in rich countries like the US and Canada.

Who are the people who don't pay to subscribe?

They usually come from poorer countries like Brazil or Vietnam or Guatemala.

So what I like about this model is that it is a small form of wealth redistribution, because we're basically getting the rich people to pay for the education of everyone.

So with smartphones, we can reach a lot of people, and we can even get the rich people to pay for the whole thing.

However, if you're trying to deliver education with a smartphone, you run into a humongous problem.

And it is that smartphones come equipped with some of the most addictive drugs that humanity has ever engineered.

See delivering education over a smartphone is like hoping that people will leave their broccoli, but right next to it, you put the most delicious dessert ever made.

If you really want to deliver education to everyone, not only do you have to make it accessible, but also you have to make it so that people want to actually learn.

And with Duolingo, we've been able to do this.

And at the highest level, the way we've done this is by making the broccoli taste like  I'll say it another way.

What we've done is that we've used the same psychological techniques that apps like Instagram, TikTok, or mobile games use to keep people engaged.

But in this case, we use them to keep people engaged with education.

Let me give you some examples of these techniques.

One of the most powerful ones is the notion of a streak.

What a streak is, is it's just a counter that measures the number of days that you've used the product consecutively.

You just take that number, you put it very prominently in your product, and then people come back every day.

And the reason people come back every day is because, well, if they don't come back, that number resets to zero, and people don't want to lose their streak.

Now, on the one side, streaks have been criticized for, for example, getting teens addicted to Snapchat.

But in the case of an educational app, streaks get people to come back to study every day.

Now to give you an idea of the power of streaks, in the case of Duolingo, we have over 3 million daily active users that have a streak longer than 365.

That means they haven't missed a day in the last year or longer.

What country do you think has the longest average streaks for an educational app?

Another important mechanism to get people to come back to your product are notifications.

On the one side, notifications can be really spammy and annoying, but in the case of an educational product, people actually want to be reminded to learn.

In the case of Duolingo, we have a very sophisticated AI system that basically chooses when to send a notification and also what to say in each notification to maximize the probability that people come back.

Now, interestingly, even after all this sophistication, it turns out that the algorithm for choosing what time to send you a notification is pretty simple.

You know what is the best time to send people a notification?

It's 24 hours after they use the product last.

If you were free yesterday at 3 p.m., you're probably free today at 3 p.m. as well.

So this is what a very sophisticated millions of dollars of AI found.

Now, with notifications, you shouldn't be spamming.

With Duolingo, we actually stop sending notifications after seven days of inactivity.

So if you don't use Duolingo for seven days, we stop sending you notifications.

Now, at some point, it occurred to us, if we're stopping to send people notifications, we should let them know.

So we started sending this notification to people, saying, hey, these reminders don't seem to be working.

You know what people do when they get this notification?