Summary: -made an annoying sound even when it's a minor mistake -familiar words kept coming up -not getting taught grammar rules formally made the process slower -robot voice not ideal (therefore) slow learning experience However, the habit-based approach of Duolingo is great and the app can be a decent starting point for beginners.

I hate, hate, hate being tested and being punished for making mistakes. I use LingQ and Anki. Neither punish you ever! It's soo counter-productive. It teaches you to fear mistakes and focusing on perfection. We've never that perfect in our native language!

I find it OK to learn Mandarin. As an English business teacher, I couldn't agree more that tiny grammatical errors are rather negligible and should not be an issue for a new language student.

Duolingo is good for language beginners, and I agree with you, the best thing is you can build up a good habit, as you know, beginners always give up. You can leave Duolingo when you can reading and listening some materials in that language, and that's what I did.

The scenery outside your window looks exactly like outside my window.

I do love this type of this video, bringing doulingo in because I spent a few years using it because I would like to pick up chinese language from the ground up and it was good until conclude the first unit. From this part and on, it was useless because it put us into some complex sentences from a very beginner withhout the due explanation.

Been doing duolingo for a streak of 380, and my deutsch learning is going great. I understand songs and sentences in media. Judt turn off the stupid sound effects completly, it's much more fun that way anyway. Im trilingual (russian, hebrew and english) so maybe it is easier to learn my 4th language but I dont mind duo❤

I don’t know I find it very effective I’m an auditory learner and most of the phrases I learn stick with with me pretty quickly after I’m done with the unit and and I tend to understand the grammar structure just by doing them and I think would make me upset if they gave me things correct for making small grammatical errors because those are errors and it’s not right and I’d rather learn how to do the language right from the beginning I could understand why that would be annoying. When I go to Spanish-speaking restaurants I can usually get my point across and order food and drinks in Spanish and I haven’t studied Spanish on Duolingo in like four years I moved on to Japanese but I still remember everything I learned and most of my friends who took Spanish for three years in high school don’t remember anything. But I know everyone’s brains work different but it seems to work for me. Also it’s very annoying when people say you can’t possibly get fluent with Duolingo I only got to like section 2 and it’s enough for me to understand how to have conversations while at a restaurant or watch TV shows in Spanish and understand most of what they’re saying and that’s only with me getting to an A1 level the app goes all the way to B2 And why do people make it so fluency has to be impossible to reach standard fluency is truly just the ability to understand receptive language and being able to express yourself in that language I definitely wouldn’t say I’m fluent because I can’t have conversations about a lot of things but I did find the few sections I did I was able to understand express myself in. B2 of the CEFR standard is a level of proficiency in a language where you can get hired for a job in that language so in my opinion that would be fluency and I think when people do Duolingo with the intention of truly becoming fluent they know when they’re cheating and not actually learning the material but only progressing just to progress there’s things you can do like trying to translate the sentence before looking at the word bank or trying to think of other sentences you could form with the same structure your learning. But I agree listening and using other resources is good and I do do that I don’t really know who if they’re really serious about trying to become fluent not trying to use the language they’re learning in any other capacity.

well i did 402 days and i got mad and stopped it... went to classes now i stopped classes and back on Duo. the annoying thing you say i find it chastises on your own language mistake as error. so conclusion use it as a back up for vocabulary but if you dont learn the grammar elsewhere its time wasted...

Wish you could get that part of your life back? Sounds like a typical experience.

As a neurodivergent learner I find the repetition very helpful, and the instant yes no for every answer (even when the ap is wrong). In traditional lessons, by the time you get to having something reviewed I’ve forgotten what we were doing so I’m lost. I need immediate feedback otherwise it’s useless and for that alone it’s worth it’s weight in gold. . I’m doing the German course so it’s not a robot voice. And I’m spending a bit of time every day…short attempt span is a problem of mine. I don’t do well with traditional lessons. After four years in school I learned almost nothing. That was 25 years ago. I’ve done a year this time and I’m at the end of A2, and genuinely there. I have German colleagues I’ve tested this on now and the improvement is nuts. I’ve now started branching out into other sources as I’ve now got enough vocabulary to make it worthwhile. So I agree with you that duo has its place. And its faults . But for me it’s been really valuable . And it’s free for most of the content. And I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I find Duolingo nice to start from 0, but, honestly, nothing will ever be better than actually interacting with natives while learning from traditional grammars. The former pushes you to use the language actively in the same way a native does and the latter gets you acquainted to the prescriptivist and prestigious way to compose in the target language. Duolingo at a point gets too repetitive and the language you learn is always on the limbo: "too formal to sound natural and too superficial to bring literary value to your studies".

which do you recommend instead?