TED Talks Daily
How to make learning as addictive as social media | Luis von Ahn (re-release)
02 Aug 2025
When technologist Luis von Ahn was building the popular language-learning platform Duolingo, he faced a big problem: Could an app designed to teach you something ever compete with addictive platforms like Instagram and TikTok? He explains how Duolingo harnesses the psychological techniques of social media and mobile games to get you excited to learn ā all while spreading access to education across the world.This episode originally aired on October 26, 2023.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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?
Chapter 2: What makes Duolingo addictive like social media?
In this archive talk, educational equity technologist Luis Van An shares how Duolingo's developers harnessed the psychological techniques employed in social media and gaming apps to 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&A between Luis and TED's Head of Media and Curation, Helen Walters.
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So I'm from Guatemala.
Chapter 3: How did Luis von Ahn's background influence his approach to education?
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 US 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.
Chapter 4: Why did Duolingo choose to focus on language learning?
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 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.
The way my brain works, all of education is just too general of a problem.
Chapter 5: How does Duolingo use smartphones to enhance education?
So I decided, let's start by teaching one thing. And then I started thinking, okay, well, what should we teach first? Should we teach math? I mean, we both love math. 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 is maybe surprising to people in North America, eventually we decided that the best subject to start with was teaching foreign languages. And let me tell you why.
Chapter 6: What psychological techniques does Duolingo employ to engage users?
There's a number of reasons. 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. 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.
Chapter 7: How does Duolingo's freemium model support education accessibility?
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 math to then learn physics to then become a civil engineer. 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.
Chapter 8: What role do notifications play in user engagement on Duolingo?
And then we called it Duolingo. 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. 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 engineered. 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. 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 dessert. 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, but 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. It works. 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 three 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. Now, one fact about streaks. What country do you think has the longest average streaks for an educational app? It's Japan. Of course. Shortest average streaks?
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