Having spent many hundreds of hours in different Duolingo courses a few years back I can confidently day that I learned... Nothing. I speak three languages fluently and a few more at the basic level, so am not a language ignoramus - but Duolingo just doesn't teach anything.
Having been an early user, I can also say confidently that from the start Duolingo was just all about gamification and getting users 'hooked'. They had venture capital and needed to show growth numbers, so that was always the focus.
There are plenty of better ways to learn, but the downsides were usually that either you have to pay or you have to make an effort and handle your own learning path. Duolingo bet on being simple one-size-fits-all and is just a weird vocabulary practice that pretends to do grammar.
The basic question then is how much your lifetime is worth. If you now have to choose between bad repetition practice in Duolingo or e.g. an actual learning path like babbel I think the answer is easy. If you want free try Anki with a popular deck of sentences, not individual words.
If anyone is still using it I suggest at least to skip the app and use the web app instead (also on your phone), this allows you to avoid spending hours of your life seeing repetitive ads and animations, and gives some acces to basic grammar explanations that absolutely absurdly have never been available on the app. But best is really to just look for alternatives, streak be damned.
Having been an early user, I can also say confidently that from the start Duolingo was just all about gamification and getting users 'hooked'. They had venture capital and needed to show growth numbers, so that was always the focus.
There are plenty of better ways to learn, but the downsides were usually that either you have to pay or you have to make an effort and handle your own learning path. Duolingo bet on being simple one-size-fits-all and is just a weird vocabulary practice that pretends to do grammar.
The basic question then is how much your lifetime is worth. If you now have to choose between bad repetition practice in Duolingo or e.g. an actual learning path like babbel I think the answer is easy. If you want free try Anki with a popular deck of sentences, not individual words.
If anyone is still using it I suggest at least to skip the app and use the web app instead (also on your phone), this allows you to avoid spending hours of your life seeing repetitive ads and animations, and gives some acces to basic grammar explanations that absolutely absurdly have never been available on the app. But best is really to just look for alternatives, streak be damned.