In its official version, Duolingo bases most of its language learning on more widely used languages ​​(especially English). This approach causes many Persian speakers who do not have a strong knowledge of English to have difficulty learning a new language—for example, French or German—because the software teaches content from English to the target language and does not support Persian as the source language.
The Iranian Web Core group has tried to overcome this obstacle by releasing an unofficial version of Duolingo. In this version, the basic language of instruction is Persian instead of English. In this way, Persian-speaking users can start learning other languages ​​directly from Persian without needing to master English. This unofficial version is said to retain all the features of the original Duolingo version, with the only major difference being the change of the source language to Persian.