Duolingo is gamification gone wrong, with most of the development effort spent on childish animations! I've been trying to learn Greek for four years using it daily, and most of the time, I'm just trying not to drop out of leagues or ruin my streak, and not so much trying to learn as the gamification incentive is to waste time, not to learn and increase my chance of dropping. What a joke! If I put all this effort into real language learning, I would have been a fluent speaker already. And I'm literally nowhere!
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Viewed another way, the gamification is a sign that they don't trust the actual content to be good enough that the user would want to return to it
They only care about engagement, as you need to keep paying for the premium service; otherwise, you will waste most of your time with the app watching ridiculous and annoying ads. I suppose they are concerned that if you don't use the app daily, you will not renew, and the premium service won't be worth it otherwise. But then you will have no streak, and will be in the first league, and friends won't like your stupid activities!
Ehh... language learning drop off rates for all methods is really high. It's a subject that people view as attractive, but it's really hard.
I really miss the tree format in Duolingo. I enjoyed being able to choose my own activities and jump around, the variety was fun and engaging. When they got rid of the tree and forced us all to use the boring straight 1-track path I got bored and couldn't sustain my daily practice.
How can you possibly use Duolingo for 4 years without learning 2000 words ? (I did, my mother did)
I know some words. Duolingo says 1,500, but I know about 500, maybe, but I still must learn many basic words and formal grammar. For example, I know the extremely useful word 'giraffe,' but I can't count, and I don't know all the colors.
> I'm just trying not to drop out of leagues or ruin my streak
You could try not getting suckered in by the gamification. I've been using Duo for years. I have no idea how I'd even find out what a league is, much less if I've dropped out of one.
I do try to use it every day, so my streak is high, but if I don't use it I don't use it.
And no, I don't think my ~15 mins a day over the same amount of time would have made me notably more fluent. I might be *differently* fluent, however as Duo heavily skews towards reading comprehension.