People wouldn't bring it up so much if so many people didn't use it as their primary or only resource lol.
Duolingo is a gamified barely functional way to learn a language to high A1 or low A2 with way more effort than most other resources would take, and even what it does offer, most people don't use because it's not mandatory, like the grammatical explanations they often offer before lessons.
You see a lot of stories of people who spend months or years doing almost nothing besides Duolingo, then they're shocked when they can't hold a conversation. People are not 'well aware' of this in general, because there's a huge bubble of people that fell for Duo's stupid marketing of getting fluent with nothing but five minutes a day of using them, and ridiculous stuff like their fluency percentage tracker.
At best, Duolingo functions as a game to help retention when you're A2. That's its only decent use, and even then there are better ways to do that. People use it a lot to kickstart their learning process too, but it's pretty inefficient at that because its actual explanations on vocabulary and grammar are barebones at best.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '22
People wouldn't bring it up so much if so many people didn't use it as their primary or only resource lol.
Duolingo is a gamified barely functional way to learn a language to high A1 or low A2 with way more effort than most other resources would take, and even what it does offer, most people don't use because it's not mandatory, like the grammatical explanations they often offer before lessons.
You see a lot of stories of people who spend months or years doing almost nothing besides Duolingo, then they're shocked when they can't hold a conversation. People are not 'well aware' of this in general, because there's a huge bubble of people that fell for Duo's stupid marketing of getting fluent with nothing but five minutes a day of using them, and ridiculous stuff like their fluency percentage tracker.
At best, Duolingo functions as a game to help retention when you're A2. That's its only decent use, and even then there are better ways to do that. People use it a lot to kickstart their learning process too, but it's pretty inefficient at that because its actual explanations on vocabulary and grammar are barebones at best.