Duolingo – optimization of the Spaced Repetition System to improve long-term memorization

Abstract

Treball de fi de grau en Llengües aplicades. Tutora: Maria del Carme Colominas Ventura

While Duolingo is the most popular online language learning platform and mobile application, the popularity of the Anki Flashcards application has grown thanks in part to its algorithm. Both applications use Spaced Repetition System (SRS), but only Anki offers customizable options and features to modify it, in order to memorize vocabulary better (Seibert, 2019). Today, it is the third most used application with SRS. The objective of the study is to illustrate how the SuperMemo 2 algorithm (Wozniak, 1998) has worked better than Duolingo’s in the short and mid-term. Through a personal learning experiment with Japanese and Chinese, using Anki and Duolingo, results have shown that applying the algorithm and adjusting the interval modifier to achieve the Eighty Five Percent Rule (Wilson, 2019) can be beneficial for short and mid-term retention. This has predicted better my forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus, 1885). Further research with bigger groups could be interesting to study long-term benefits of the algorithm.