It always depends on what level you mean. From my experience, it excels at getting you from zero to A1 fluency in whatever categories you care about (reading - writing - listening - speaking); everything above that requires a more varied training regimen.
My own story: Around 2021-02 I decided to start learning Finnish, because there was this really cute girl who lived there. (She's now my wife, and pregnant with our first child, so mission accomplished!) I kept my approach as simple as possible: Get Duolingo Plus, and just run through it every day before and after work until I could do every level with my eyes closed.
When I moved in 2021-08, the week after the COVID-19 borders reopened, I was almost entirely useless in Finnish. But not entirely! And nowadays I'm only mostly useless in Finnish. So it was a success in that regard. Some folks here also know me as the guy behind various open-source Finnish language learning software tools, which is also cool.
I still think the KISS approach was the right one for the earliest stages for me - language learning was and is consistently my most hated subject, so I understood that I would have to use every trick in the book if I wanted to stick with it.
Comments
It always depends on what level you mean. From my experience, it excels at getting you from zero to A1 fluency in whatever categories you care about (reading - writing - listening - speaking); everything above that requires a more varied training regimen.
My own story: Around 2021-02 I decided to start learning Finnish, because there was this really cute girl who lived there. (She's now my wife, and pregnant with our first child, so mission accomplished!) I kept my approach as simple as possible: Get Duolingo Plus, and just run through it every day before and after work until I could do every level with my eyes closed.
When I moved in 2021-08, the week after the COVID-19 borders reopened, I was almost entirely useless in Finnish. But not entirely! And nowadays I'm only mostly useless in Finnish. So it was a success in that regard. Some folks here also know me as the guy behind various open-source Finnish language learning software tools, which is also cool.
I still think the KISS approach was the right one for the earliest stages for me - language learning was and is consistently my most hated subject, so I understood that I would have to use every trick in the book if I wanted to stick with it.