No way will Duo Lingo get you anywhere close to A2 for writing or speaking. MAYBE A1 if you try hard at it for a long long time in a language it well supports.

To get to A2 you need a real tutor and real communication experience. I used Verbling to find a tutor and I traveled to Eastern Europe over the summer to practice and only after hundreds of hours of practice was I able to communicate in Russian to any degree even approaching A1.

>To get to A2 you need a real tutor

No you don't. I'm French, I dropped out of school at 16 and picked up English later in life without using any formal method of learning. I started by memorizing enough vocabulary to read simpler English, after which I began reading popular fiction and watched movies with subtitles (in English) until it clicked. My understanding of the language is more based on intuition (sheer memorization of exposure to it through cultural mediums) than on memorizing the grammar rules book. The brain makes the connections as to what seems correct or not based on patterns. I don't think my skills are good enough to write literature but surely communication isn't a problem.

Duolingo didn't exist at the time, but I believe it would have helped me learn faster considering the way it introduces languages is quite similar to how I started learning and it does so in a more interactive, fun manner.

English is different. It’s everywhere.

A2 is nothing and you definitely don't need a tutor to get there.

If you're actually operating in an environment where it is spoken naturally for a prolonged period of time, I agree with you. Or if you're doing one of those intensive 8 week things with The State Department. But for regular programmers from America learning a foreign language that isn't Spanish it is really hard to get to A2 and impossible without a tutor. I've known plenty of people that think they're at A2 and can't even give basic driving directions when asked on the street. Taking an online test isn't the same thing as actually communicating about arbitrary topics.

A2 is defined as:

* Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment).

* Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters.

* Can describe in simple terms aspects of their background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.

No way you need a tutor to get that. Duolingo course seems about right depending on language and language learning experience.

Perhaps take a look at 'Modern Russian' materials (Clayton). Great drill course from the 1960s with books and cassettes.

I have more recommendations if you want them.

I'm interested in those recommendations.

Isn't Russian one of the hardest languages to learn if you don't already know a slavic language?

It's only hard for a European language and that's only really because of the complex grammar because it isn't an analytical language. Both Chinese, Japanese, even Arabic are all harder. I'd say compared to French it takes me about 4x the length of time to make the same progress.

This largely depends on the language.

More complex languages, yes, but for languages like swedish/norwegian/danish where there is very little grammar, I find it's much easier to progress within the limits of their program.

It also depends on the languages you already speak.

Swedish/Norwegian/Danish do not really have "little grammar", but for an English speaker, there probably won't be any need to explicitly learn the grammar, since it works mostly like English. But on the flipside, they are just as difficult as English for speakers of unrelated languages.

>for an English speaker, there probably won't be any need to explicitly learn the grammar, since it works mostly like English //

For a period in the UK there was no English grammar taught in schools. This caused me great problems in Russian class (second high school language) as I had no idea there were cases in English and so had no reference for why a case was needed and what it did. The entirety of my English grammar training was learning a poem by rote for homework, which I didn't do ("A nouns the name of anything [...]"). I learnt the little grammar I know from French lessons. So, YMMV depending on the English speaker.

Having left school 3 years ago, I can confirm there is still no grammar taught in english lessons. It was all taught to the AQA exam we did. I studied french and german too, and all my grammar knowledge comes from there and from languages at uni. There's obviously basic things in primary school but that's like where to put commas, that's it.

Historically we were taught Latin grammer disguised as English grammer - so 'tenses' when English only has two tenses (past and present) and 6 or more moods (shall, could, will, might etc, etc)

Most English 'grammer' discussed in the Anglophone world (split infinitives WTF? English doesn't have infinitives) is gibberish...

Well, now they teach made up nonsense about "fronted adverbials" ("Stupidly, they do it too early.") in primary school, they spend quite a bit of time on sentence structure and labelling the parts of speech. It's too much IMO and comes easy too early.

It's because English grammar is either obvious and doesn't need teaching or is inexplicable and isn't worth trying to make a pattern out of.

I ran, she ran, he ran, they ran, we ran, y'all ran.

I run, she runs, he runs, they run, we run, y'all run.

I'll run, she'll run, he'll run, they'll run, we'll run, y'all'll run.

I thought I'd run, he thought he'd run, they thought they'd run.

We'll have wished we ran, they'll have wished they ran, he'll have wished he ran.

What exactly do you want to teach here? The only weirdness to the rule is that he and she runs with an "s", everything else is the same.

I love you. You love me. They love him. He loves them.

I want you. You want me. They want him. He wants them.

In Russian the above is far different because the word order can be switched for emphasis.

The only thing in English worth teaching is "I have" vs "I am" and almost every language has that same problem as well (Je suis vs J'ai in French).

The hard part with English is that our spelling makes zero sense, unlike Russian or French. The grammar is really quite straightforward.

So verb forms are not the only part of grammar. In these examples you've covered sequences of tenses, mood, word order, and it could be argued aspect. Ask someone to point out the parts of speech and they'd be able to point out the pronoun and verb, that's usually it.

He runs to the store. I suggest that he run to the store.

Even verb morphology is a bit more complex than you've called out here.

A 10 word sentence has 10! possible word orders of which only 1 is correct - that is grammer

You seem to think that "verb morphology" is all there is to "grammar".

Also everything in English has dozens and dozens of exceptions that you just need to memorize.

A good way to teach that for native users might be to teach why that is the case and leave the specifics to happenstance.

This isn't unique to English.

> When you complete a course you're not done

This definitely rings true. I was using it in the hopes it would help me provide some structure to teaching my kid portuguese (and it does to some extent), but by the time the app says a lesson is "complete", my kid is still a long ways away from having memorized it (and he's 5). I tend to complement it with a boogie board and repetition over the course of several days to really nail down new vocab.

I also wish it had some feature to introduce foreign concepts (e.g. gendered articles in portuguese). It's very awkward to try to explain the difference between `the`, english `a`, and portuguese `a` (and the remaining counterparts `o`, `um`, `uma`) for example, and the word matching exercises can get quite confusing.

You can't just keep taking new lessons. You have to do "strengthen skills" or go back to practice older lessons on a regular basis. In fact, the new scoring system they just released with levels (crowns) for each lesson is supposed to emphasize this; to really complete something, you have to go back and practice it many times.

When I do duolingo, I usually try to do about a two to one ratio of strengthening skills or going back to older lessons with taking new lessons.

Compared to working from a book it is ace - you get listening, speaking, reading and writing and it gets you where you want to be

I did the first three levels of Ukranian and when I went to Lvyv I picked out a couple of hundred words in shops and restau

Could I speak? No, but Duolingo gets you onto the pitch faster and better than anyone else - it gets you in play fast - so you can start learning the language properly