Learning and memory
Is there a Duolingo for general knowledge?
Short answer
Yes, in format. Several apps apply Duolingo's model to general knowledge: a short lesson, a question at each step and, in some, a streak. Nibble, Kinnu, Imprint, Curio AI and Scroll (ours) each do a version, with lessons from under a minute to about 10 minutes and paid plans from $1.99 a month in the US.
When people ask for a Duolingo for something, they usually mean the format more than the owl: a lesson short enough to do every day, a check at each step, points, and a count of days in a row. On October 17, 2026, Google’s autocomplete suggestions for “duolingo for” included finance, coding and anatomy, and “duolingo for knowledge” completed to general knowledge.
The format is familiar from Duolingo, which reported 58.7 million daily active users in the second quarter of 2026, up 23% from a year earlier, in its shareholder letter of August 5, 2026. It has also moved past languages: its App Store description lists 40+ languages plus chess, math and music. General knowledge isn’t on that list, which is the gap the apps below try to fill. Scroll is one of them, and it’s ours.
What the Duolingo format is made of
Take away the owl and the format comes down to these parts.
- A lesson short enough to do every day; Duolingo’s App Store description calls its lessons quick but gives no length.
- A check at each step, so you find out at once whether your answer was correct.
- A streak, which Duolingo defines as “the number of days in a row you’ve completed a lesson.” A Streak Freeze covers a missed day, and you can hold up to two at a time.
- Points and leagues. Duolingo awards XP and runs weekly leagues; a new one starts every Sunday in your time zone, and you move up or down “based on your study efforts,” as its blog put it in 2023.
Duolingo’s own figures show how much work the streak does. In a 2022 post on its blog, the company said learners who reach a 7-day streak are 3.6 times more likely to complete their course, and that adding Streak Freeze raised the number of daily active learners by 0.38% in relative terms. The first figure is a correlation, since the people who were going to finish anyway are also the ones who keep long streaks. In June 2026 a one-time event let eligible learners restore their longest-ever streak if they opted in and completed three lessons, and 15.4 million learners revived their streaks.
What testing yourself does, in the lab
The check after each step is the part with a long line of lab research behind it. In Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 experiment, students who took a quick recall test instead of rereading remembered 56% of a passage a week later, against 42% for those who reread it, even though rereading made them feel more confident. Five minutes after studying, rereading came out ahead (81% to 75%). The gain from testing showed up later.
Rowland’s 2014 meta-analysis pooled 159 effect sizes and found that testing yourself beat rereading by a medium margin (Hedges’ g = 0.50), and by more when people checked their answers afterward (0.73). A g of 0.50 means the average person who tested themselves scored higher than about 69% of those who reread. Results varied a lot from study to study, and most were lab experiments.
Two limits apply to the general-knowledge apps below, ours included. The 2006 tests were free recall (writing down everything you remember, with no feedback) after longer passages, while a Scroll quiz is one question with four options after about 69 words. And none of their store listings cites a study of the app itself; Scroll hasn’t been studied. Scroll lessons are short introductions for general interest. They aren’t medical, psychological or financial advice, and we haven’t tested whether reading them changes anyone’s memory or focus. For a decision about your health or money, talk to a qualified professional.
Here is a Scroll lesson on a related idea, the generation effect, with its question as it appears in the app.
The Generation Effect
You remember information better when you generate it yourself rather than passively receive it. Completing the word "psych_l_gy" is more memorable than reading "psychology." Teaching a concept to someone else cements it more than re-reading notes. Active generation forces deeper processing.
Source Slamecka, N.J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect.
Quick quiz
Which study method BEST exploits the generation effect?
General-knowledge apps that use the format
The table compares five general-knowledge apps, with Duolingo for reference, using each app’s US App Store listing or website on October 17, 2026. “Not mentioned” means the listing and website we read don’t say. The feature may still exist.
| App | Topics | Lesson length, as stated | Check | Streaks or points | Price (US) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duolingo (for reference) | 40+ languages, chess, math, music | Not stated | Speaking, reading, listening and writing practice in its language lessons | Streaks, XP, weekly leagues | Free; paid Super removes ads and adds perks |
| Scroll (ours) | 1,700+ lessons in 8 categories, such as History and Science | 21 to 115 words, 32 to 50 seconds | One four-option question after each lesson | Streaks, XP, 42 achievements | Free plan has 5 lessons a day; $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year |
| Nibble | 35+ topics, including math, history, art, logic and philosophy | About 10 minutes (store); 3 to 10 minutes (site) | Questions inside each lesson | Not mentioned | Listed at $19.99 a month; yearly plans from $12.99 to $89.99 |
| Kinnu | Psychology, health, science, history, technology, literature and a random mix | Not stated | Adaptive review questions and games | A weekly stamp count in its release notes | $1.99 a month listed; certificates $7.99 to $19.99 |
| Imprint | Psychology, philosophy, history, finance, business, health, science, technology | A chapter in two minutes or less | Daily quizzes | Not mentioned | $15.99 a month; yearly listed at $74.99 to $99.99 |
| Curio AI | Science, history, psychology, technology, culture, nature, plus your own topics | Not stated | A quiz after each lesson | Streaks | $14.99 a month or $49.99 a year; contains ads |
Scroll takes the most mechanical parts of Duolingo (a streak, XP and achievements, a question after every lesson) and makes the lesson as short as anything in the table: one idea in 21 to 115 words. You can save a lesson to come back to later. It has no audio, no book summaries and no languages besides English. The free plan includes 5 lessons a day, and Premium removes that limit.
Nibble is the most course-like of the five, with lessons of about 10 minutes that have questions inside them, plus games, chats with historical figures, and video and audio episodes. Its site says the first lesson is free. Kinnu puts general knowledge in its name and has the lowest monthly price listed here; its listing describes review questions and games, audio versions of all content and a map you move across, and it doesn’t mention a daily streak.
Imprint teaches with illustrations, in chapters it says take two minutes or less, and adds daily quizzes. Curio AI uses AI to choose topics and explain them in a style you pick, quizzes you after each lesson and keeps a streak.
Two more are worth knowing about, outside the table. Brilliant covers math, coding, AI and physics with interactive lessons and a tutor that adjusts to your level. And if you want a free daily check with no subscription, the Wikipedia app has added a daily trivia game called “Which came first?”
Where the comparison with Duolingo stops working
A language course builds on itself: later lessons reuse the words and grammar from earlier ones, so a streak and XP track progress through something. General knowledge mostly doesn’t stack that way. A lesson on the Black Death and a lesson on CRISPR don’t need each other, so in a general-knowledge app the same counters mostly track that you showed up.
The habit research also treats a missed day more gently than a streak counter does. In Lally and colleagues’ 2010 study of new daily habits, missing a single day did not derail the process, and the time for a new behavior to become close to automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days (the study ran 84 days, so the longest times are projections). A streak without a freeze resets anyway. Scroll’s does: a missed day resets the streak, though your XP and achievements stay.
The same format for money
Scroll’s sister app, Scroll: Learn Personal Finance, uses the format for money: short lessons on saving, debt, investing and tax, each ending in a four-option quiz, with XP, streaks and 5 free lessons a day. It’s at scrollfinance.app.
How to choose one
All five general-knowledge apps in the table are free to download. They differ in four ways that are easy to check before you pay.
- A Scroll lesson takes under a minute, an Imprint chapter up to two minutes and a Nibble lesson about ten, so the time you usually have decides a lot.
- Scroll and Curio AI ask a question after each lesson, Nibble asks inside the lesson, and Kinnu uses questions and games to review what you’ve read.
- Kinnu has an audio version of everything and Nibble has audio episodes, while Scroll has no audio at all.
- Over a year, on the US listings of October 17, 2026, Scroll’s yearly plan is $19.99, Curio AI’s $49.99 and Imprint’s $74.99 to $99.99; Kinnu’s $1.99 monthly plan comes to $23.88 over 12 months.
The quickest test is a week with one of them at the time you’d usually open a feed. To try the format first without installing anything:
For a wider comparison that includes book-summary apps, see our comparison of microlearning apps. For a routine built around one short lesson a day, see our five-minute daily learning routine.
Drafted with AI assistance and checked against each app's own listing or website and the sources below on October 17, 2026.