I have been using Duolingo for the past 18 months in an effort to learn Italian. I came to the conclusion, that after about a year, Duolingo by itself is nothing but an exercise in frustration. I made good progress for the first 12 months. I felt that my vocabulary increased steadily and I was able to piece together the gist of most conversations I heard. After a year, however, lessons starting taking me way too long. Before the year mark, I was normally getting about 70-90% of my daily lessons correct the first time through and would finish three lessons in about 15-20 minutes. After a year I started getting maybe 30% of my lessons correct the first time through and three lessons were taking 45 minutes. Getting most questions wrong for days on end is not good for one’s psyche. I was not feeling like I was learning anything after a certain point.
There are several problems with Duolingo. The first is that there is no explanation of why something is right or wrong in how grammar rules apply. This is very difficult for a native English speaker. English does not apply a gender to its nouns. Italian and many other languages do. English just uses the word “the” in front of a noun. (Like the bus, the comb, or the fork). In many languages, the equivalent of “the” depends on the gender of whatever item you are talking about. Verbs that act on nouns also change based on the gender of the noun. This is never explained by Duolingo. I know some German, so I am somewhat familiar with this concept, but it is still very confusing without some sort of explanation as to how these grammatical rules apply. Duolingo gives no explanations of any sort.
The other problem, which really baffles me, is that after 18 months of three lessons a day, the user has not been taught to count to ten??? I took German for two years in high school. I also studied some Spanish and Korean. I know how to count to ten in all these languages despite giving a fraction of the effort to Korean and Spanish that I have to Italian with Duolingo. They start teaching counting after 16 months and then they mix numbers into sentences that I usually have trouble constructing if the numbers were not in there. And they don’t just mix in numbers, they mix in equivalents to first, second, and third, for example, without first teaching one, two and three. Every method I have ever seen teaches student to count early in their learning. I used to enjoy learning a little Italian every day. For the last 6 months I have absolutely despised it. I used do lessons seven days a week. I found myself using “weekend amulets” to avoid weekend lessons. I lost all joy in learning Italian.
Today I realized that I am not going to learn much if I hate something. I uninstalled Duolingo after 18 months of nearly three lessons a day. I have installed Memrise. Hopefully this will bring back some of the enthusiasm for learning I had when I started. If you want to learn a new language, Duolingo definitely helps with vocabulary, but learning sentence construction will require something else. Hopefully Memrise helps.
Update:
I tried Memrise for a while and found it too simplistic. It is nice that it uses real people saying words and phrases, but I guess I was farther along than I thought. I have re-installed Duolingo, but limit myself to one lesson a day. I find that it is having me do more refresher lessons now. Maybe I was going to fast. I find that it is fun again at this pace. I ask native Italian speakers and do Google searches if a concept is not explained by Duolingo. It is a free app. Maybe I was expecting a little too much of it.