After a few weeks with the Greek course and adding important words to Anki, I was able to communicate with Greeks who know no other language - which I was surprised to find many of. The Arabic course is less useful by itself, only because Arabic itself is very dependent on dialect and Duolingo teaches a mix of Egyptian / MSA. But the Duolingo course did provide a terrific cornerstone to learn the specific dialect that I am interested in, so it had real value.
You _will_ need to supplement the vocabulary with Anki or another tool. You won't become fluent, but you will get a good basis to start talking with people comfortably. Becoming fluent depends on keeping up that talking. I would say that Duolingo gives a terrific starting point, at least for the three languages I've learned with it.
Fluent with Duolingo alone? Very unlikely in my experience.
From my point of view, you can make it to A1/A2 proficiency in a language with Duolingo alone - after that, it gets quite hard. Teaching grammar and conjugations isn't its forté, without resources outside of Duolingo it will get rather tricky.
That being said, I still use Duolingo for my daily dose of language exposure - but without Anki (for vocabulary), youtube videos (to explain various specific topics) and evening courses (which help a lot by giving a structured approach on what to learn in what order), my learning curve would probably flatten out.
I'm using Duolingo to learn Russian because my spouse is Russian and I want to communicate better with his family (especially his grandmother, who speaks less English than I do Russian).
After nearly a year, I can help set up for dinner ("Where are the plates?" "There is bread on the table already" "Do you want tea?") and similar things.
Now I'm getting into genitives and such, and that's where Duolingo really seems to not do well. It doesn't explain why a word appears a certain way in a tense, it just makes you memorize that it does. Sometimes I'll ask my husband why, and he just says "Well, because that's the way it is". Of course I'll use the same explanation when my MIL asks me something about English.
> Sometimes I'll ask my husband why, and he just says "Well, because that's the way it is". Of course I'll use the same explanation when my MIL asks me something about English.
Most native speakers are useless for why. You ideally want someone who learned both your native language and the language in question. Then they can often explain things relative to your language, and you'll learn things about your language and the language in question. Look for language notes from Hong Kong; I had found a university site with very helpful information on French many moons ago, but I can't find it again, it was written in fluent English, but with insights on English usage that were unlikely to occur to native English-only speakers.
Duolingo is best when you're the average American, with a few years of language courses in high school that you've half forgotten. As you go, it all kinda fills in. I tried learning Arabic from scratch and while it's fantastic for learning the alphabet and memorizing words, it became obvious fast that I'd need to do some reading outside the app.
I don't know if they have changed this in the few years since I let my Duolingo streak lapse, but they actually have decent explanatory text for each lesson, it's just not (or wasn't) accessible from the mobile app; you had to use the desktop website to see it.
Tourist fluent, maybe. Enough to go to a country and get by on the patience of the natives.
I did French all through high school and most of college, then learned firsthand that I was maybe 25% as fluent as I assumed. Then I went home and went through the entirety of the Duolingo curriculum in a few months, without learning anything new (a couple new vocab words, maybe).
So, you could view this in two ways: either it's a scam that tricks you into wasting a lot of time viewing ads or paying a subscription without delivering on its promise. Or, you could see it as a shortcut that's worth at least a couple years of classes. But, at least in my experience, it does not enable you to speak a language with fluency.
(Which makes total sense if you step back and look past the marketing promises. Of course 20 minutes a day with a cartoon bird is not going to replace actually living in a country and being immersed in the language 24/7)
Well, nothing is going to compete with immersion. And immersion isn't going to help you unless you have enough understanding to build atop of.
Else you're like a dog listening to steam of human sounds: "Not walk, not walk, not walk, ...WALK!! (I know that one!), not walk, not walk, ..."
In my experience, Duolingo and other entry level apps can get you there especially for the person who hasn't learned a second language thus doesn't even know where to begin.
You're right. My skill was hard-won! And it showed me how to make DL so much more practical! My first 2 suggestions are simple parameter changes to their existing software :)
Duolingo and other apps are good to learn a little bit about the language, but what you really need to do to become fluent is to have conversations with native speakers, read newspapers and immerse yourself in the culture as much as possible.
Luckily, that is a lot easier these days with the internet!
Yeah two months into my two years in Madrid my Spanish improved more than it did in two years of lessons and online learning as well as three years of school Spanish.
I can still understand a lot of Spanish and when I’m warmed up and have been back a few days my conversational level comes back.
I found it a very effective way of learning a new script (devanagari) but I'd have really struggled to answer sentence based questions without studying at all outside the app. (I'm reading Snell's textbooks on Hindi, and have finished the Duolingo course.)
An app is only ever going to be an adjunct to a real course taught by a real human. As an adjunct, it works pretty well for teaching vocabulary and practicing in between classes.
