Cool, I guess. But you're probably better off just downloading a real textbook. The PDFs aren't hard to find.
Having these handy might help with some of the gotchas if you forget while using it.
The problem with Duolingo is that it doesn't really implement spaced repetition if you go down the tree in sequence. If you do a lesson about, say, technology you'll end up being prompted for "file", "mouse", "website" etc... over and over again, then you'll move on and basically never meet these words until you decide to redo this lesson.
I've just ended my 1200+ days Duoling streak literally two days ago, so I won't pretend that I hate it, but I must say that finally reaching my objective of getting a fully gilded Russian tree was a relief. I was getting really annoyed at the owl and its idiosyncrasies towards the end.
I was in the process of pushing French up to level 2 when they introduced a ton of new content. So I'm projecting my way back up to a full level 1. (I had boostrapped that with Pimsleur.)
That, plus reading, a few podcasts, and Netflix has gotten me to the point where I can push my way through a young adult novel (with a dictionary) or watch a kid's show (usually with the subtitles, since French is a terrible, terrible language to listen to).
So I'm curious what it's like after 1200 days. (My current streak is about 400. Early in the pandemic I'd do a dozen lessons a day; now I do the bare minimum.) How would you describe your familiarity with the language?
My Portuguese is good enough to have day-to-day conversations and I can read things like newspaper article without problem. Note that my native language is French though, another Romance language, so the gap was really not that large to begin with. I'm sure you must find the complicated French conjugation system, plus the gendered nouns a bit of a headache if you're a native English speaker. That stuff works pretty similarly between French and Portuguese, so I had a big headstart here, I could just focus on memorizing the differences (the portuguese subjunctives can go fodar themselves by the way).
Russian is a whole other ordeal however, I still have a long way to go until I reach fluency. I can usually decipher newspaper articles okay-ish, but oral comprehension is still very low and my ability to construct the language is still pretty basic, although I could probably go through a simple conversation with a native with a lot of effort and many mistakes. The main difficulty at this point is learning and remembering all that vocabulary, I can't rely on cognates like for Portuguese and to a lesser extent English. I need to relearn basically everything. That takes a lot of time, and Duolingo really only gets you so far.
English is a big leg up on French. Some of the cognates may be unfamiliar or dated, but I've got a big English vocabulary and a lot of that has French and/or Latin origin. I'm still very bad at advanced conjugation, in part because things like the subjunctive and conditional just don't come up in as great a number (as well as being more complicated than their English equivalents).
Well, félicitations, and удачи!
One thing to always keep in mind is that there's no trick really, learning languages is not about being smart or being super good at anything, just having enough discipline and dedication to keep working at it until it starts making sense.
Thank you for your kind words and bonne chance à toi aussi !
Weakest skill is speaking, but I'd do mostly ok renting a hotel or ordering food.
I used Duolingo to reach a place where I could read books in Spanish, and then I switched to books. It can’t be that bad.
The best tools are the ones you use. If Duolingo is the tool that compels you to advance your practice, then it’s de facto better than the ones that don’t compel you that you never use.
FWIW I like duolingo, but I wish they were clearer about their strengths and weaknesses. I've maxed out Arabic, and am halfway through French. I got about 1/3 through Japanese before giving up because their approach just doesn't work for it. It clearly works much better for latin languages, and even in Arabic it's great for vocab but lousy for grammar and idioms. As I said in my top post, I think phone typing is an underrated skill, particularly for a foreigner in a new country.
Nothing short of time and immersion are going to solidly teach just about anybody a language, but I have some friends who've tried it and then got discouraged on language learning all together because of the frustrating parts of the app, and the fake sense of progress that's inherent in some of their marketing =(. On the other hand I'm on a 600+ day streak and have gained a ton from the app pressuring me to come back every single day.
If you think about it, how well did you speak your native language at 4? How well at 7? Did you attend any classes to teach yourself? No, I assume not. So how come you are fluent?
Turns out, it is all about ingesting as much as possible. Even if you barely understand at the beginning. More of it - learning grammar is just a distraction. You can skim the book to have an overall grasp of it, but that's it. You weren't learning your native language grammar by the age of 7, did you?
The key is to ingest comprehensible input. If you can't understand the sentence, have a visual cues. Start simple by learning most frequent 1000 words (should take you 2-3 months max with Anki) and then you can easily switch to sentences. Just keep your senteces at the level that you understand almost everything but a word or two. One word ideally.
Read or watch only context you like, you are interested in and you have fun with. That's it. Do it long enough, every day, and you are set.
As an example, I've been learning Japanese in class for 2.5y and could not read nor speak as well as I'd like to. Not to mention I couldn't read kanji at all. Now after 9 months of trying language acquisition I can read children books (Winnie the Pooh) and comic books. If that's not a win, I don't know what is.
I’ve used it to teach myself the equivalent of GCSE grade B (but sadly not a useful CEFR level) in German several years ago, yet after reaching that level of total effort in Greek and Esperanto a little more recently I feel almost useless in the former and only slightly better in the latter (and Esperanto is the easy one!)
I’ve also been doing at least one Duo Arabic lesson per day since 24 September last year, and still don’t know that alphabet. (Doesn’t help that particular course renders some of the pronunciation guide symbols as “2” and “3”, but this is definitely not the only thing holding me back).
I came into it already knowing how to read and write, and just wanting vocab, grammar, and typing practice. It was pretty decent for that, although the early lessons were absolutely jam packed with errors. I think that may have been fixed now. The later lessons they released were much better, so I assume they've improved the earlier ones.
As a side note, https://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Alphabet-How-Read-Write/dp/081... is really excellent, and not very pricey. If you do a few letters a day and really practice you'll be able to transliterate in a couple of weeks.