Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.
Speaking from personal experience, if you’ve actually put in substantial time in the last year, you’ll find that a lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.
There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why would it help you learn a language?
I’ve used it as the way to get started and build a base of vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.
Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never claims it will bring you to full fluency.
Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem too easy).
Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don’t think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the characters better in my reading as well.
The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps you’re using, just use characters (except for in answers to verify you’re right).
One thing that you will notice is that even if you can’t utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more immersive methods now, you’ll realize that it’s all there under the surface - you’ll very likely make very rapid progress.
How many characters has Duolingo showed you (if you can get that metric)?