SMF·DUOLINGO-SUPER
Can a prompt replace Duolingo Super?
Learning & languages — gamified language course
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Super does not add a product, it removes friction from one: no ads, no running out of hearts, unlimited retries. The thing you would have to rebuild is not those toggles but the course underneath them — hundreds of skill trees, each a sequenced curriculum with exercise generation, audio and error handling per language. That is thousands of person-years of authored content plus the most carefully tuned habit loop in consumer software.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a daily drill trainer for a language, over a sentence bank you own.
The bank is a plain file: source sentence, target sentence, tags. Fill it from graded readers, subtitle files for shows you have watched, or sentences you collected — not from a paid course.
A session is fixed at ten items and must end. Generate exercise types mechanically from each pair: translate source to target; fill a blank where one content word is removed; and reorder a shuffled word bank into the target sentence. Grade translation with a normalised comparison that ignores punctuation, capitalisation and accents-versus-no-accents, and shows a character diff on failure — exact string matching makes the tool feel hostile within a day.
Track a streak and print it, but design the mechanics in the opposite direction from the app: never block practice, never charge for retries, and never break the streak silently. Show "practised on N of the last 30 days" beside it, which is the honest number.
Schedule with FSRS over items, not sessions, so a session is drawn from what is actually due.
Add audio only if you have licensed or self-recorded files; leave text-to-speech out unless you have checked that the voice pronounces your target language correctly, because a wrong model teaches wrong pronunciation confidently.
Do not build leagues, gems or a shop. Without other people they are decoration, and imitating a mechanic whose whole function is social pressure produces something faintly sad.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the courses themselves — over a hundred language pairs, sequenced and voiced
- B.2 exercise generation that produces new items from the same material
- B.3 the streak, leagues and friend quests that make people show up daily
- B.4 speaking and listening exercises with speech recognition
- B.5 the mobile apps and offline lessons
Prior art
- AnkiLicense: AGPL-3.0
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: course content and habit design
Duolingo's real product is that you open it every day, and a hand-made drill without leagues, streak freezes or a green owl does not compete with that on the third Tuesday of a difficult month.
Questions
Can I export my Duolingo vocabulary?
Not in any supported way — the words-learned list is not exportable, and the endpoints that once served it are gone. Your sentence bank starts from scratch, which in practice means starting from a graded reader or a subtitle file.
Where do sentences come from?
Tatoeba is the usual answer: a large, openly licensed collection of sentences with translations, from which you can pull a few thousand pairs for most major languages. Subtitles from shows you own work well too, because you already have context for them.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing. It is local, with no key and no service, and it works on a plane.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Showing up. Duolingo's course is good and its retention design is better, and a self-built drill has neither the sequencing nor the pull that gets you to day two hundred.
Related tools
Receipt