I really enjoy the reminders. I'm learning Spanish with Duolingo right now and the "promise to myself", which the app reinforces through several features really helps me a lot
Shrug? It helped me learn Spanish alongside immersion, and I can read Portuguese and French off of only using Duolingo. Also used it to learn the Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets.
After I realized the leaderboards and achievements don’t matter my progress plummeted.
Matter in what way? I feel like getting the achievements and stuff is useful just as a gentle motivator to open the app and do at least a couple lessons every day.
Overall though, it's not the greatest way to learn a language. Its better than doing nothing, but not as good as studying seriously via other means.
For learning vocab Memrise is a million times better despite their endless efforts to make it shit. I am enjoying learning letters with Duolingo though. I already knew how to read Arabic, now I know how to read Hindi and I'm learning Japanese. It does not help me to WRITE though, but there are other apps for that.
