From Duolingo to an Anki Deck for Japanese: What Exports, and What Never Will

There is a genre of post on r/duolingo and r/LearnJapanese stable enough to parody: a screenshot of an impressive streak, a completed Japanese course, and the confession that actual Japanese media remains impenetrable. The top comment always contains the same two words. Anki. The search phrase "duolingo anki deck japanese" is that exact moment of transition typed into a search box, and it deserves a straight answer, because the honest version has a hole in the middle: Duolingo has no export button. There is no official way to download your vocabulary or your progress.

Usual disclosure up front: I build Piccard, a flashcard tool that competes with a slice of Anki's job, so I read these threads the way a chef reads other menus.

Why the migration happens

Duolingo's machinery is motivation engineering. The streak rewards showing up. Hearts ration mistakes: run out, and your options are to wait, to grind a practice session, or to subscribe. Leagues reward points. Not one of those variables is "how strong is your memory of this particular word," and none of them pretends to be. That is not an accusation. Getting a learner to the desk daily is a real problem and Duolingo solves it better than almost anyone; it is simply a different problem from the one you have once the habit is built and the vocabulary refuses to stick.

The second gap is the schedule. Duolingo does resurface old material, but on its own terms: the review timing is invisible and unchangeable, and you cannot check it against the memory science (spaced repetition has a shape; the forgetting curve does not negotiate). Anki is the opposite package: zero motivation dressing, and the schedule is the entire product. Every card tells you when you will see it again and lets you argue.

The third is exercise shape. Course exercises lean heavily on multiple choice and tile matching, which is recognition. Reading a subtitle line with no tiles to tap is retrieval, a harder skill, and the standard complaint in these threads is that years of recognition did not buy any of it.

What "export" can actually mean

Since nothing exports officially, every route from Duolingo to Anki is unofficial, and they come in exactly three shapes:

The community deck. Search AnkiWeb's shared deck library for "Duolingo Japanese" and you find what other Duolingo graduates built before you: transcriptions of the course, uploaded as decks. This is the closest thing to "the Duolingo Anki deck" that exists, so it deserves the honest framing: it is someone else's word list. It carries the course's words, not the ones you personally kept missing, and not the ones you walked in already knowing. It inherits the deep limit of every preset deck. We unpacked that limit in the Kaishi 1.5k write-up; the short version is that a preset list cannot know which slice of itself is review you do not need.

The scraper. Community scripts that pull your account data have existed for years. Some worked. The problem is structural rather than moral: they depend on undocumented internals, so every site update kills them quietly. If one works for you today, export once and never build a routine on it. Read the terms of service yourself; that call is yours, not mine.

Manual. Retyping works and costs evenings, and it fails in a specific direction: you transcribe the words you remember noticing, and noticing is a poor proxy for not knowing. The words that most need a card are the ones you skimmed past without a flinch.

The deck worth taking, and the deck nobody can ship you

If what you want is a solid starter deck to land on after the course, take the better-built version of that idea: Kaishi 1.5k, roughly 1,500 words, frequency-ordered, every card carrying an example sentence, maintained by the immersion-learning community. A course transcription is a weaker instance of a category Kaishi is the best instance of; if you want the full map of what is worth downloading, the deck comparison has its own page.

Past the starter band, the deck you need stops being downloadable at all: words from the material you actually watch and read, in the order you meet them, with the sentence that carried them. No stranger can hand you that file, because it does not exist until you make it. Making it is the part I built Piccard for (the case against exporting your way there has its own page), so here is what it does, as built today.

While watching. On YouTube videos that have captions, you get bilingual subtitles and a per-line transcript. Tap a subtitle line and candidate cards come back: the word, its meaning in English, an example sentence from that line, pronunciation. Keep what is worth keeping, discard the rest. The tapped line only; a video without captions has no lines to tap, and the extension tells you so instead of guessing. Off YouTube, a double-click on any Japanese word on any page opens the popup dictionary, which runs on JMdict data.

From documents. The course leaves you with material worth mining once it ends: transcripts you kept, articles, a textbook chapter, the PDF sheets the course itself hands out. Paste or upload any of it and candidates come back tiered high, medium, or low for how much each is worth learning, the high ones pre-selected; one confirm turns at most 20 into cards. The cap is sized to what a confirm costs the model, each card meaning a few hundred generated tokens, not to any growth mechanic.

In review. FSRS-6, zero configuration: 0.9 target retention, no settings page on which to get it wrong. A card saved from a video replays the exact YouTube moment it came from, which matters more than it sounds, because the sentence and the scene are the memory hooks and the scheduler does the rest. Modern Anki ships the same FSRS family, so the engine was never the disagreement (the forgetting curve, spaced repetition). One honest limit: uploading audio or video files for transcription is English-audio-only, so for Japanese listening material the caption route above is the route.

The short version

The migration is rational. Streaks get you to the desk; a memory engine has to schedule by forgetting, not by motivation, and Duolingo will not hand over either its schedule or its words. So a "Duolingo Anki deck" is either a stranger's transcription of the course or a script with a shelf life. Take Kaishi for the starter band if you want a list today; from the first episode you actually care about, capture beats any list, and nobody says both halves must live in one tool. If your evenings are YouTube rather than the course, how subtitle extensions export into Anki is its own topic.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards), then prepaid top-ups at $5 / $10 / $20; no subscription, and topped-up energy never expires. To try the tap-a-line version: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

All guides: Piccard Blog.