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, ...
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.
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