How to make learning as addictive as social media | Luis von Ahn (re-release)

Summary

Podcast Summary: TED Talks Daily Episode: How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media | Luis von Ahn (Re-release) Host: TED Release Date: August 2, 2025

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of TED Talks Daily, Luis von Ahn, a renowned technologist and the creator of Duolingo, delves into the innovative strategies employed to make learning as addictive as popular social media platforms. Hosted by Elise Hu, the episode promises a deep dive into the intersection of education, psychology, and technology.

Luis von Ahn’s Journey and Motivation

Luis von Ahn begins by sharing his personal background, providing context for his passion for educational equality.

• From Guatemala to Academia
  "I received a rich person's education, even though I didn't grow up rich," [03:23] von Ahn reflects on his upbringing in Guatemala, highlighting the disparities in educational access. His single mother's dedication to his education enabled him to pursue higher studies in the United States, culminating in a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

• Vision for Equal Educational Access
  "About 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everyone," [04:28] von Ahn states, emphasizing his commitment to democratizing education. This vision led to the inception of Duolingo, aiming to make language learning accessible worldwide.

Choosing the Right Educational Focus

Von Ahn discusses the strategic decision-making process behind selecting foreign languages as the starting point for Duolingo.

• Why Languages?
  "There's about 2 billion people in the world learning a foreign language... About 80% of them are learning English," [05:35] he explains. Learning English, in particular, can significantly enhance income potential, making language education a valuable investment for many.

• Accessible Through Smartphones
  Recognizing the global penetration of smartphones, von Ahn and his team chose a mobile-first approach. "Most of the world's population already has access to a smartphone," [06:28] he notes, allowing Duolingo to reach a vast audience without the prohibitive costs of building physical schools.

Gamifying Education: Techniques from Social Media and Gaming

A significant portion of von Ahn’s talk centers on how Duolingo incorporates psychological techniques from addictive platforms to enhance user engagement.

• Streaks: Building Consistent Habits
  "A streak is a counter that measures the number of days you've used the product consecutively," [08:39] von Ahn describes. This feature taps into users' desire to maintain their learning streaks, fostering daily engagement. "We have over 3 million daily active users that have a streak longer than 365," [09:21] he highlights the effectiveness of this approach.

  "Streaks have been criticized for getting teens addicted to Snapchat, but in the case of an educational app, streaks get people to come back to study every day." [09:16] — Luis von Ahn

• Sophisticated Notification Systems
  Duolingo employs an advanced AI system to optimize notification timing and content. "The algorithm for choosing what time to send you a notification is pretty simple... 24 hours after they use the product last," [10:36] von Ahn explains. This ensures reminders are timely and less intrusive.

  Additionally, von Ahn shares a clever tactic to re-engage inactive users: "Passive aggressive notifications are really good at getting people to come back because they feel like our green owl mascot has given up on them," [11:13].

• Mascot and Cultural Impact
  The Duolingo owl mascot plays a pivotal role in user interactions. "All our notifications come from our green owl mascot, and he's passive aggressive and also pretty," [11:47] von Ahn mentions, adding a humorous touch that has sparked numerous memes and even SNL skits.

Impact and Reach of Duolingo

Von Ahn underscores the substantial impact Duolingo has had on global education.

• Widespread Adoption
  "There are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States than there are people learning languages across all US high schools combined," [13:00] he reveals, showcasing the platform's extensive reach and effectiveness.

• Revenue Model: Freemium Strategy
  Duolingo employs a freemium model, allowing free access to language lessons while offering ad-free experiences through subscription. "It's a small form of wealth redistribution, because we're basically getting the rich people to pay for the education of everyone," [07:44] von Ahn explains, highlighting the platform's commitment to accessibility.

Future Aspirations and Educational Philosophy

Looking ahead, von Ahn expresses his aspirations to extend Duolingo's success to other educational domains.

• Expanding Beyond Languages
  "I hope as humanity, we can do what Duolingo has done for learning languages, but for all other subjects," [13:00] he states. Von Ahn envisions a future where subjects like math and physics are taught with the same engaging methods, making high-quality education universally accessible.

• (screen time Reimagined)
  "I hope for a future in which screen time is not a bad thing, in which we can deliver high quality education to everyone... using a mobile phone," [13:00] von Ahn concludes, challenging the conventional negativity surrounding screen time by demonstrating its potential for educational enrichment.

Q&A Highlights with Helen Walters

In the post-talk Q&A, Helen Walters probes deeper into von Ahn’s thoughts on applying Duolingo’s strategies to other subjects.

• Applicability to Other Subjects
  Von Ahn responds, "Subjects that are learned through repetition... you can use the same methods," [14:29] indicating that disciplines requiring repetitive practice are prime candidates for gamification and mobile-based learning platforms.

• Challenges with Conceptual Subjects
  He acknowledges the difficulty in translating these methods to subjects that require more conceptual understanding, such as in-depth explanations, suggesting the need for complementary tools like educational videos.

Conclusion

Luis von Ahn effectively illustrates how leveraging psychological techniques from social media and gaming can transform educational platforms, making learning engaging and accessible. Duolingo stands as a testament to the potential of technology in democratizing education, with ambitious plans to extend these methodologies to a broader range of subjects. The talk encapsulates a vision where educational screen time is not only productive but also as captivating as the most addictive social media platforms.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Education as something that brings equality to different social classes... I always saw it as the opposite, as something that brings inequality." [03:52] — Luis von Ahn

• "Streaks have been criticized for getting teens addicted to Snapchat, but in the case of an educational app, streaks get people to come back to study every day." [09:16] — Luis von Ahn

• "I hope for a future in which screen time is not a bad thing, in which we can deliver high quality education to everyone, rich or poor, using a mobile phone." [13:00] — Luis von Ahn

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This summary encapsulates the essence of Luis von Ahn's talk, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how Duolingo leverages addictive design principles to promote education and his vision for the future of learning.

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I have been using Duolingo to learn Korean and I definitely could say at times I've been really hooked. Like many of us feel. I don't want to lose my streaks so how did the app make language learning fun? In this archive talk, Educational Equity technologist Luis von Ahn shares how Duolingo developers harness the psychological techniques employed in social media and gaming apps to make the app compete with addictive platforms and in doing so, how they've been able to spread access to language education across the world. Stick around after his talk for a brief Q and A between Luis and Ted's head of media and curation, Helen Walters.

[N/A]

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[Elise Hu]

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[Luis von Ahn]

So I'm from Guatemala.

[N/A]

So Guatemala is right below Mexico.

[Luis von Ahn]

And for the Americans in the audience.

[N/A]

And let this sink in because it.

[Luis von Ahn]

Really applies in most ways for the Americans in the audience, you can think of it as Mexico's Mexico.

[N/A]

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

[Luis von Ahn]

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

[N/A]

Guatemala is a very poor country. And a lot of people talk about.

[Luis von Ahn]

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.

[N/A]

Now, I was fortunate that I received.

[Luis von Ahn]

A rich person's education, even though I didn't grow up rich. And it's because I'm an only child.

[N/A]

And my mother, who was a single mother, spent all of her resources on my education.

[Luis von Ahn]

This allowed me to come to College, to the US and eventually get a PhD in computer science. Now, because of all of this, about 10 years ago, I decided 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 PhD student, Severin.

[N/A]

The way my brain works, all of.

[Luis von Ahn]

Education is just too general of a problem.

[N/A]

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

[Luis von Ahn]

Should we teach math? I mean, we both loved math. Me and my co founder, we both loved 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 is maybe surprising to people in North America, eventually we.

[N/A]

Decided that the best subject to start.

[Luis von Ahn]

With was teaching foreign languages. And let me tell you why. There's a number of reasons One of them is that there's a huge audience for it.

[N/A]

There's about 2 billion people in the.

[Luis von Ahn]

World learning a foreign language both in school and outside of schools.

[N/A]

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

[Luis von Ahn]

About 80% of them are 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.

[N/A]

And it's because you can directly make.

[Luis von Ahn]

More money if you learn another language, in particular English.

[N/A]

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

[Luis von Ahn]

For example, take math. In the case of math, just knowledge of math does not increase your income potential because usually you have to learn.

[N/A]

Math to then learn physics, to then become a civil engineer.

[Luis von Ahn]

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 that.

[N/A]

The only way to really reach a.

[Luis von Ahn]

Lot of people was by using a mobile phone or a smartphone in particular.

[N/A]

See, building schools all over the world.

[Luis von Ahn]

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.

[N/A]

In order to truly be accessible to.

[Luis von Ahn]

Everyone, rich and poor, Duolingo uses a freemium model to support itself.

[N/A]

What that means is that you can.

[Luis von Ahn]

Learn as much as you want without ever having to pay.

[N/A]

But if you don't pay, you may.

[Luis von Ahn]

Have to see an ad at the end of a lesson.

[N/A]

Now, if you don't like ads, you.

[Luis von Ahn]

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.

[N/A]

Now, who are these people who pay.

[Luis von Ahn]

To subscribe to turn off the ads?

[N/A]

Well, they're usually people well off people.

[Luis von Ahn]

In rich countries like the US And Canada. Who are the people who don't pay to subscribe?

[N/A]

They usually come from poorer countries like.

[Luis von Ahn]

Brazil or Vietnam or Guatemala.

[N/A]

So what I like about this model is that it is a small form of wealth redistribution, because we're basically getting.

[Luis von Ahn]

The rich people to pay for the education of everyone.

[N/A]

So with smartphones, we can reach a lot of people, and we can even get the rich people to pay for the whole thing. This is great. 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 TikTok, Instagram mobile games. See, delivering education over a smartphone is like hoping that people will eat their broccoli. But right next to it, you put the most delicious dessert ever made.

[Luis von Ahn]

If you really want to deliver education.

[N/A]

To everyone, not only do you have to make it accessible, but also you have to make it so that people.

[Luis von Ahn]

Want to actually learn.

[N/A]

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

[Luis von Ahn]

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

[N/A]

The same psychological techniques that apps like.

[Luis von Ahn]

Instagram, TikTok, or mobile games use to keep people engaged. But in this case, we use them to keep people engaged, but with education. Let me give you some examples of these techniques. One of the most powerful ones is the notion of a streak.

[N/A]

What a streak is is it's just a counter that measures the number of.

[Luis von Ahn]

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.

[N/A]

And the reason people come back every.

[Luis von Ahn]

Day is because, well, if they don't come back, that number resets to zero. And people don't want to lose their streak. It works.

[N/A]

Now, on the one side, streaks have.

[Luis von Ahn]

Been criticized, for example, getting teens addicted to Snapchat.

[N/A]

But in the case of an educational.

[Luis von Ahn]

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.

[N/A]

Now, fun fact about streaks. What country do you think has the.

[Luis von Ahn]

Longest average streaks for an educational app? It's Japan, of course.

[N/A]

Shortest average streaks.

[Luis von Ahn]

Latin America, baby.

[N/A]

But we're fun. Hey, we're fun. Another important mechanism to get people to.

[Luis von Ahn]

Come back to your product are notifications.

[N/A]

On the one side, notifications can be.

[Luis von Ahn]

Really spammy and annoying.

[N/A]

But in the case of an educational product, people actually want to be reminded to learn. In the case of Duolingo, we have.

[Luis von Ahn]

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? I'll tell you. It's 24 hours after they use the product last, because there's an easy explanation.

[N/A]

If you were free yesterday at 3pm, you're probably free today at 3pm as well. So this is what a very sophisticated.

[Luis von Ahn]

Millions of dollars of AI found. It's funny.

[N/A]

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

[Luis von Ahn]

And we're not spammy with Duolingo. We actually stop sending notifications after seven days of inactivity.

[N/A]

So if you don't use Duolingo for seven days, we stopped sending you notifications. Now, at some point it occurred to us, if we're stopping to send people notifications, we should let them know.

[Luis von Ahn]

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

[N/A]

We'll stop sending them for now. You know what people do when they get this notification? They come back passive aggressive. Works for my mother works for Duolingo. These passive aggressive notifications are really good.

[Luis von Ahn]

At getting people to come back because they feel like our green owl mascot has given up on them.

[N/A]

So they come back.

[Luis von Ahn]

And speaking of our green Owl mascot, by the way, because all our notifications come from our green owl mascot and, well, he's passive aggressive and also pretty.

[N/A]

Pushy, this has given rise to a lot of memes on the Internet that.

[Luis von Ahn]

Make fun of just the great lengths that he will go through to get you back to learn a language. Now Duolingo has entered the zeitgeist and there's thousands of memes. There's SNL skits about it.

[N/A]

And it's because we've managed to get.

[Luis von Ahn]

People to want to learn a language.

[N/A]

By using the same techniques that mobile.

[Luis von Ahn]

Games and social media use to get people engaged. And this is a really important point. Let me say this.

[N/A]

I don't actually believe that there's a.

[Luis von Ahn]

Way to make an educational app be as engaging as something like TikTok or Instagram or mobile games.

[N/A]

But the good news is that.

[Luis von Ahn]

And by the way, the reason I.

[N/A]

Don'T believe that is because ultimately you have to teach people something and it's.

[Luis von Ahn]

Hard to compete with like cats and celebrities.

[N/A]

But the good news is that I don't think you have to. See, here's the thing. When you're learning something, you get meaning out of it, whereas when you're scrolling for two hours on Instagram, a lot of times afterwards, you feel like you just wasted your time. So I think it's actually okay if your educational product is only 80 or.

[Luis von Ahn]

90% as engaging as something like TikTok, because the other 10 or 20% will be provided by people's internal motivation, though of course not much more than that.

[N/A]

This is really a key point. If you want to get people to do something meaningful, you can use the.

[Luis von Ahn]

Same techniques that apps like social media use to get people to do it.

[N/A]

And even if you're not as engaging.

[Luis von Ahn]

As those apps are, you can still get hundreds of millions of people to use your product. In the case of Duolingo, for example, there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States than there are people learning languages across all US High schools combined. And this is true in most countries in the world. My hope is that I know we can do this, but my hope is that as humanity, we can do what Duolingo has done for learning languages, but for all other subjects where we can get people to learn math with mobile phones, like millions of people to learn math with mobile phones or physics or whatever. I hope for a future in which screen time is not a bad thing, in which we can deliver high quality education to everyone, rich or poor, using a mobile phone.

[N/A]

But the single most important thing that.

[Luis von Ahn]

I can end this talk with is a reminder to please, pretty please, I beg you, do your language lessons today. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

[Elise Hu]

Louise.

[Helen Walters]

Thank you so much. Thank you. I wonder if you can just say a little bit more about that last point about. How do you. How do you think that you can apply this type of thinking to other. Other subjects? So you mentioned math, you mentioned things like that. How do you do that?

[N/A]

Yeah, I think in particular, subjects that are learned through repetition, and it turns out most things that are kind of.

[Luis von Ahn]

Really meaningful, learned through, like thousands and thousands of repetitions. You learn to read through repetition. You learn elementary school math through repetition.

[N/A]

Most things that you can learn through.

[Luis von Ahn]

Repetition you can actually gamify and turn into something like Duolingo, where people just do it a lot and do it fun.

[N/A]

It's a little harder for things like explanations.

[Luis von Ahn]

That's probably going to require some really good videos. Sal Khan is doing a really good job with that.

[N/A]

But for things that require a lot.

[Luis von Ahn]

Of repetition, I think we can use the same methods.

[Helen Walters]

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[Luis von Ahn]

Thank you.

[Elise Hu]

That was Luis von Ahn at TED 2023. This talk was originally posted in October 2023. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

[N/A]

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