One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.
Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)
†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
Duolingo's marketing of "learn a language in 5 minutes a day" or whatever their similar slogan is, is bad. Duolingo won't teach you hardly anything at all in only 5 minutes a day, and even with considerably more time (30 minutes to an hour a day), on it's own it is unlikely to teach you a language. However, in combination with other learning tools like classes, immersions, comprehensible input, etc. It is a very valuable tool. I finished the German class in about 2 years, and I found it helpful, and wished that the Duoloingo German class continued further than it did.
Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.
Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?
The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language.
But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.
I used Duolingo a fair bit in 2015–2017 to improve my Swedish, and generally enjoyed myself. Having not touched it for most of a decade, I downloaded it earlier this year to try my hand at basic Greek and wow but it’s gone downhill. Everything is massively over the top, all subtlety has left the system, and when I stopped after a couple of days because I couldn’t deal with the intensity they sent me nagging messages for over two weeks in more and more pleading tones trying to get me to come back. I’d never use them again at this point.
I had a similar experience, I was a heavy Duolingo user between 2014 and 2016 (I used it for Spanish) and I still believe that back then it was actually a pretty good way to learn the basics and I had learnt enough to be able to get by in Spain, have casual conversations with people, even hang out with a group of natives (but I also was a member of a few WhatsApp groups with Spanish people so I had a bit more practice).
Then they dumbed down the phone app and soon enough they did a similar thing with the website. Tips & Notes section was gone (or they kept it but removed a lot of information? can't remember), the tree-style courses were gone and replaced with some kind of a Path, the exercises became too easy and they'd make you translate from Spanish to English most of the time, which is much easier than the other way around. Then they removed the ability to type with your keyboard, added the "match the word pairs" exercise (which sucks if you use a keyboard and yes, I know you can try to use the numbers on your keyboard), all of which made the whole experience even worse and less effective.
I lost my streak somewhere in the middle of this enshittification process and I've never really gotten back to using the site, other than maybe checking once a year whether it's still shitty (and it always is).
In my opinion, back in 2014 Doulingo used to be a learning website with some gamification aspect that made the learning process a bit easier and more entertaining. Now it's just a gaming app which tries to give you a false sense of learning a language but in reality you aren't learning anything. Just a waste of time.
It sucks balls. I learned more in one month of studying from a textbook and attending conversation classes than I did in two years using Duolingo. And its so much worse now than its ever been!
I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.
It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.
I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.
I finally abandoned the app this spring.
I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.
Both of my parents are teachers of a European language. They both have phd's in linguistics, and rate very highly with students (who basically adore them).
All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.
I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.
But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.
---
Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning as an adult is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself motivated. People who watch native media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.
As an entertainment device, Duolingo is fine. I used it to start my French journey, not truly appreciating the INCREDIBLE difficulty and quantity of effort required. Fortunately for me, I was and still am super curious about languages, and I really want to learn.
I speak French now at roughly a B2 level. When I travel to la Francophonie, I get by, and people are usually reasonably impressed by my level (or at least are humoring me, which is fine). But my friends and family who have seen me hold conversations in French, as impressed as they may be, would never put in the amount of effort that I have.
I have a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, mostly learning Russian. The app has got progressively worse since I started, for a while just giving me the same lesson every single day. I of course finished the course years ago, but I keep up with my one lesson a day to keep the bird happy. I find the UI incredibly annoying, I've disabled all the sounds and animations that I can. You might ask why don't I stop? Well I want to keep up my Russian, and the one lesson a day keeps my brain ticking over.
Anecdata: my daughter, when a rising high school sophomore in 2023, used DL to skip a full year^1 and join upperclassmen in Spanish 3. She went on to take AP Spanish, earn college credit w/ her AP test score, and join the Spanish National Honors Society. She credits DL w/ giving her the confidence -- and vocabulary -- to make the leap when she did. Of course that doesn't mean critiques aren't valid, and YMMV, but it does help show that DL isn't necessarily useless, either.
1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.
I couldn't stand Duolingo because of the gamification. I'd complete a section and then there would be four screens telling me I earned points, then another screen saying I earned a different type of points, then a screen asking to share my results, etc... Each lesson was only a couple minutes so this ends up taking a non-trivial amount of time. Also, the sentences were often times nonsensical and nothing you would use in a real conversation. However, I would sign up tomorrow if I could get rid of all the gamification nonsense. There simply aren't that many half-way decent Hindi options out there. Pimsler is by far the best, but it only has two levels and you can only do it so many times.
Duolingo is great at gamification and terrible for actually teaching you the language. You memorize a ton of random words without really learning how to put everything together.
I found Babbel to feel much more like an app designed by language instructors.
I'm currently holding a 1100 days of streak of Italian in Duolingo, so I think I am entitled to drop in my 2 cents ;)
To some extent I agree with the critique. Would I be able to write an assay like the op in Italian? surely not. Is their marketing annoying? yes, very much. Is the platform perfect? far from this. However - after 3 years with Duo I am capable of having causal, simple conversations, I can navigate most of the websites in Italian, I understand most of the marketing emails, I can write simple emails myself. I trust this is mostly due to DuoLingo - building the vocabulary and quickly recognizing the patterns (and It was not super simple, my native language is Polish, and I was learning Italian via English interface - there was no Polish-Italian course back then, now there is one but it's just very low quality).
Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns. During the 3 years I've spent with the platform I made trips to Italy, I tried talking to people, tried to read texts and and explored some grammar myself. About a month I go feeling I've outgrown the platform I started doing 50min conversations on Preply platform and I am now confidently moving into stage where I can build longer sentences, use past and future tenses and irregular verbs.
In my discussions with friends I emphasize that IMHO Duolingo alone is not going to teach you (complete) language. If you have a goal to learn a language (in general, not on Duolingo) and you use it as one of the tools - it could be really helpful.
I agree with your last point. I get the criticism of Duolingo and it is fair, but I can't agree that it is completely useless. I learned/am learning French. I can get by with non-English speakers and people won't immediately switch to English when they hear me.
It took about 5 years of on and off practice. Not sure how much actual time I put in. Duolingo was one aspect, where honestly I probably learned like 75% of my vocabulary. I also have a French wife and friends, took classes, hired teachers, watched movies, read news, etc, etc, etc. I probably could have got to where I am without Duolingo but I'll never know. Learning a language is a pain in the ass and I don't think any one thing is really going to do it. Duolingo is free and can be one aspect out of many that will help get you there.
IIRC the CEO(?) of Duolingo was asked what he would choose if he had to choose between a more effective language course and more gamification. His answer was gamification, because the best course doesn't help anyone if noone shows up.
So at least they know that it's not the best way of learning a language.
I do feel like many of the Duo critiques are strawmen. Of course no single method will lead to new language fluency. Even full immersion requires practice and often classes.
I use Duo, Pimsluer, live in Italy, and will start classes in a month or so. Duo is a fun game that also helps with my language journey.
I think what you say about having 'outgrown' the platform is basically hitting the nail on the head here. Duolingo knows their audience is people just looking to start learning a language. That's the top of the funnel and therefore the place where they can capture the most users, which for them makes sense because the majority of users are monetized through ads.
There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.
So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.
Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.
I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...
Duolingo was amazing for learning the Russian alphabet, something I struggled with from YouTube videos, etc. I can confidently read Russian nowadays (although I may not understand everything). I did get quite far in the lessons as well, but I don't have a high opinion of them. There were things I've learned from Duolingo that I said to native Russian speakers who were like... "we don't say that".
Note: The alphabet lessons are separate from the main content.
I first used Duolingo back in 2018. That was how I started learning French. I majored in Classics in college and had taken Spanish all eight years of middle school and high school, so my vocab progress was very fast. Within that year, I felt like Duolingo had become too slow, and decided to switch my learning over to reading books and watching movies in French.
Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.
Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).
A lot of Duolingo criticisms to me read like someone saying "I was walking on a home treadmill for 30 minutes every day but I didn't really get in shape until I started spending 5 hours each week in the gym with a professional trainer."
Yes, obviously an actual class with a qualified teacher is going to teach you a language faster than Duolingo. Obviously you will learn faster if you move to a foreign country or if you have people around you to regularly speak your target language. Obviously you can cheat at Duolingo and not learn anything, just like you could turn the speed way down on your home treadmill and not really get any exercise.
But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa, and a ten minute language lesson will still teach you more than no language lesson at all.
I think Duo could be a good way to get started on language learning, but it is not effective on its own. What it lacks is an obvious way to graduate from its call and response mechanic to synthesis, as in creating your own sentences and participating in conversation.
Tandem was a good way for me to improve my Spanish to the point that I felt comfortable traveling. I dropped Duolingo pretty soon after starting on Tandem. Language learning is much more than memorizing words. Unfortunately, Tandem is also basically a dating site for many people, and scammers are using it as well, and this makes it hard to use consistently for language learning.
Once you get the minimal confidence that you think you could find your way back to the airport or bus station in another country, you really should just go visit. Couchsurfing really helped me meet people in many cities. I don't know if the community is still as strong, but it used to have regular meetups of people within a city who are interested in talking with foreigners. You don't need to stay on people's couches if you don't want to.
A lot of people seem to be learning English through multiplayer online gaming. I do not know if this approach works for learning other languages, as I am not inclined to participate.
I can't stress it enough, though. Any language learning approach that isn't writing or conversation is going to max out at a very low level.
Duolingo and many other apps avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.
It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.
You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:
The language is difficult -> La lengua es difícil.
But that's a slog by comparison. The dopamine rush isn't there, which I guess is why no one does this[0].
I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.
I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."
[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to
> avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.
The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :)
(or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)
> Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog
That's not something against translating, that just means you haven't done it enough yet, so you're still too slow.
The first time you translate a basic sentence it might take 10s. 2nd time 5s. And so on. The 100th time it takes 0.05s and you can just say it without thinking. If one just keeps translating, you automatically reach that point.
87 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 90.2 ms ] threadThey cannot give you a chart or synopsis to save their lives. They are quite weak on tenses for this reason.
†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.
Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.
Edit: just went to delete my account and they’ve got a tearful owl above the “Erase personal data” button to try to guilt-trip me into staying. https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg
Then they dumbed down the phone app and soon enough they did a similar thing with the website. Tips & Notes section was gone (or they kept it but removed a lot of information? can't remember), the tree-style courses were gone and replaced with some kind of a Path, the exercises became too easy and they'd make you translate from Spanish to English most of the time, which is much easier than the other way around. Then they removed the ability to type with your keyboard, added the "match the word pairs" exercise (which sucks if you use a keyboard and yes, I know you can try to use the numbers on your keyboard), all of which made the whole experience even worse and less effective.
I lost my streak somewhere in the middle of this enshittification process and I've never really gotten back to using the site, other than maybe checking once a year whether it's still shitty (and it always is).
In my opinion, back in 2014 Doulingo used to be a learning website with some gamification aspect that made the learning process a bit easier and more entertaining. Now it's just a gaming app which tries to give you a false sense of learning a language but in reality you aren't learning anything. Just a waste of time.
I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.
It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.
I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.
I finally abandoned the app this spring.
I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.
All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.
I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.
But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.
---
Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning as an adult is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself motivated. People who watch native media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
In the end this is the only one that matters.
You can do things before going to that country that will help. But you'll never be close to fluent without taking that final step.
As an entertainment device, Duolingo is fine. I used it to start my French journey, not truly appreciating the INCREDIBLE difficulty and quantity of effort required. Fortunately for me, I was and still am super curious about languages, and I really want to learn.
I speak French now at roughly a B2 level. When I travel to la Francophonie, I get by, and people are usually reasonably impressed by my level (or at least are humoring me, which is fine). But my friends and family who have seen me hold conversations in French, as impressed as they may be, would never put in the amount of effort that I have.
1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.
I found Babbel to feel much more like an app designed by language instructors.
To some extent I agree with the critique. Would I be able to write an assay like the op in Italian? surely not. Is their marketing annoying? yes, very much. Is the platform perfect? far from this. However - after 3 years with Duo I am capable of having causal, simple conversations, I can navigate most of the websites in Italian, I understand most of the marketing emails, I can write simple emails myself. I trust this is mostly due to DuoLingo - building the vocabulary and quickly recognizing the patterns (and It was not super simple, my native language is Polish, and I was learning Italian via English interface - there was no Polish-Italian course back then, now there is one but it's just very low quality).
Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns. During the 3 years I've spent with the platform I made trips to Italy, I tried talking to people, tried to read texts and and explored some grammar myself. About a month I go feeling I've outgrown the platform I started doing 50min conversations on Preply platform and I am now confidently moving into stage where I can build longer sentences, use past and future tenses and irregular verbs.
In my discussions with friends I emphasize that IMHO Duolingo alone is not going to teach you (complete) language. If you have a goal to learn a language (in general, not on Duolingo) and you use it as one of the tools - it could be really helpful.
It took about 5 years of on and off practice. Not sure how much actual time I put in. Duolingo was one aspect, where honestly I probably learned like 75% of my vocabulary. I also have a French wife and friends, took classes, hired teachers, watched movies, read news, etc, etc, etc. I probably could have got to where I am without Duolingo but I'll never know. Learning a language is a pain in the ass and I don't think any one thing is really going to do it. Duolingo is free and can be one aspect out of many that will help get you there.
I definitely agree. I would say that my Spanish proficiency was somewhat similar.
I think the Duolingo base is a good launchpad to kickstart your additional learning from. Boska Wloska!
I use Duo, Pimsluer, live in Italy, and will start classes in a month or so. Duo is a fun game that also helps with my language journey.
There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.
So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.
Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.
I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...
Note: The alphabet lessons are separate from the main content.
Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.
Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).
Yes, obviously an actual class with a qualified teacher is going to teach you a language faster than Duolingo. Obviously you will learn faster if you move to a foreign country or if you have people around you to regularly speak your target language. Obviously you can cheat at Duolingo and not learn anything, just like you could turn the speed way down on your home treadmill and not really get any exercise.
But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa, and a ten minute language lesson will still teach you more than no language lesson at all.
Jk, I agree with you but that doesn't mean there are no meaningful criticisms of the treadmill
Tandem was a good way for me to improve my Spanish to the point that I felt comfortable traveling. I dropped Duolingo pretty soon after starting on Tandem. Language learning is much more than memorizing words. Unfortunately, Tandem is also basically a dating site for many people, and scammers are using it as well, and this makes it hard to use consistently for language learning.
Once you get the minimal confidence that you think you could find your way back to the airport or bus station in another country, you really should just go visit. Couchsurfing really helped me meet people in many cities. I don't know if the community is still as strong, but it used to have regular meetups of people within a city who are interested in talking with foreigners. You don't need to stay on people's couches if you don't want to.
A lot of people seem to be learning English through multiplayer online gaming. I do not know if this approach works for learning other languages, as I am not inclined to participate.
I can't stress it enough, though. Any language learning approach that isn't writing or conversation is going to max out at a very low level.
It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.
You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:
But that's a slog by comparison. The dopamine rush isn't there, which I guess is why no one does this[0].I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.
I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."
[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to
[1]: https://mangolanguages.com (not sure why no one knows about this)
[2]: https://busuu.com (probably the best for grammar)
[3]: https://memrise.com (very, very good AI text convos with corrections provided and mixed language support)
The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :)
(or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)
That's not something against translating, that just means you haven't done it enough yet, so you're still too slow.
The first time you translate a basic sentence it might take 10s. 2nd time 5s. And so on. The 100th time it takes 0.05s and you can just say it without thinking. If one just keeps translating, you automatically reach that point.