[bstpierre]

I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.)

I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.

For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.

I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.

But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.

What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.

I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.

Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)

Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)

[epistemer]

Duolingo was my gateway drug to Anki. I just can't imagine going back to Duolingo with the speed of going through say a 100 cards in Anki. There is just so much animation/sounds/nonsense in the way with Duolingo. It would take at least 10X longer.

There is absolutely something special about building decks too. I also get pretty much the same motivation from the timeline statistics in Anki as the streaks in Duolingo.