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I did every German module on Duolingo in a 5-month preparation for moving to Germany for my job, and I got the coveted Golden Owl to prove my proficiency...

... only for me to get to Germany and realise very early on that I would need to do a basic A1 language course.

The app was gibberish; the pronunciations were wrong, the genders were misleading, and the daily interactions they tried to drill in me were far from useful.

The overinflated proficiency instilled in me by the app, made me genuinely believe I could interact easily with a German - a delusion I was quickly and painfully made aware of, much to my chagrin.

I used Duolingo maybe ten years ago to get myself up to approx A1, mid-A2 level German. Back then every new piece of grammar actually had an explanatory page that you could study before jumping in to the quiz games. As the enshittification began, they made these harder to find so that instead encountering a new linguistic concept in the quiz felt like a cruel guessing game.

For beginners to German these days, I heartily recommend the free “Nicos Weg” course from DW that goes up to B1 at least. Also has, unusually for language classes, a cast of likeable characters played by reasonably good actors carrying a consistent, building storyline throughout the lessons.

> Back then every new piece of grammar actually had an explanatory page that you could study before jumping in to the quiz games.

These still exist but they're hidden in a little unlabelled button at the top right of the unit overview and I don't think they ever mentioned it to me or do any hinting to go look at them. It's silly cause they're quite useful. I guess they just want people doing the lessons (playing the game) and not boring them with asking them to read about grammar.

At least it's still clearly labelled "guidebook" in the web version (which has always been better than the app in some ways). But the content is dumbed down and enshittified too. These days it just contains a couple of random phrases from the unit rather than any actual pedagogical content.

It's a big button that looks like a notebook at the top of the screen. It's not hidden at all. As I recall it used to be only on the desktop and not in the app, but it's readily available in the app now

Agreed. Even Seedlang was of limited use to me past a certain point, I just think it did a much better job at the same niche as Duolingo.

For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start.

I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that when I learned other things later on, instead of being actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what it actually meant.

It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was able to bridge the meaning between words and was actually understanding and following entire conversations.

My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I probably should take some courses for that though. But I am at least fluent which is great.

That's called Brain Soaking :)

I think this kind of understanding is really important too, if speaking to native speakers of a language.

You're level may be basic and not super fluent, but if you can make yourself understood you can have a conversation. But if your listening comprehension is not good enough and the person is not slowing down (or if it's multiple native speakers speaking at a natural cadence) then you're lost.

I speak three languages and I'm learning a fourth. Don't study grammar, ever, it's a waste of time. Grammar rules always fall into one of two categories: the ones that are so obvious that you would have learned them after two examples anyway or the ones that are too vague and complicated to be useful. For an example of the latter look up people making flowcharts for the subjunctive or for the ga/wa distinction. Or, for that matter, find me the place in an english grammar that explains why you get "on" a train, but "in" a car.

For me, it's been helpful to understand grammar in German and I don't consider it a waste of time. Your experience seems to be different and I'm glad you enjoy it that way.

You walk onto a train. You climb into a car. Whether it's [in/on] depends on what verb "get" is replacing.

I don't know if there's a name for this kind of rule or if it's just a vague implicit thing.

why not "walk into a train" ?

I couldn't tell you why this is a rule, but at least to my Canadian English speaking ears, if you said "Joe walked into a train", I'd think that Joe walked across some train tracks and was struck by the train, not that he boarded it.

Because you "walk into" things and get hurt. Like walls, or trees. The notable exception is buildings, or less tangible things like a spotlight.

Trains, ships, and busses are a weird kind of middle ground between on/in.

Thinking about it, I believe the principal difference is if there is something significant (more significant than the roof of a train) above your head? It seems to be very subjective and though, any time I think I've gotten it figured out another example/edge case comes out.

In drugs, on only my socks.

Underrated comment.

But the feet are in the socks and the drugs are inside you!

From the socks perspective they are on you!

Duolingo itself claims its German course goes up to B1 content, so I really do not understand why would anyone expect fluency as an outcome.

It is reasonable to expect to be a litle bit more then A2. Fluency is not.

Humans don't learn the grammar by "understanding the theory". Humans learn the grammar by using the language repeatedly.

But a book on theory can be mass produced and sold to everyone who wants to learn a language. Can't bottle and mass produce an actual experience of using the language for years. So theory it is.

That's a big generalization. Do you have any data to back up that first claim?

For German, knowing grammatical cases {Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive} has been helpful as an on-ramp to using the language repeatedly correctly.

Note the term you're reaching for: "on-ramp". Even in your own experience, theory is a crutch.