You seriously need a basic beginner book if starting from fresh, and use Duolingo just as a repetition tool when you can during the day
I'm learning Japanese now through books, Anki, and a few webapps. The gamification is gone and streaks don't really matter. I'm sticking with it because I'm enjoying learning, not because the owl is threatening me.
Going to a fixed sequence of learning "the path" so that you're forced to cover topics and words in a specific order, and then introducing grammar that has never been taught... Why? Either cover them in order, or don't.
Eventually, you figure out the right answer by trial and error and "learn" it, but only after having developed a bad habits and wrong answers... Why? Of course there are Anki's and such out there that cover all the words so I guess they want you to just do that.
You can pick a lot worse to learn to be able to stumble through a language for vacation.
Learning the first few words in a language to start becoming competent in it is not a bad thing. Managing one's expectations is really important.
Not all learners will learn best with a textbook or course first. Variety helps.
Humans have learned language by speaking before as much as, if not more than reading/writing.
Now, are there better apps coming out for this kind of thing? Absolutely. The potential for LLM to be able to generate and listen to pronunciation will be amazing.
Prioritizing speaking before learning to read or write a language really seems to irk some folks.
It didn't teach me to speak alone but expanded my vocabulary enough to stumble through conversations. Which was enough to being improving through speaking with locals.