Instead I'm taking a different approach. I'm getting each skill to level 2, which is the point right before lessons start asking you to type answers and take away the word bubbles. That gets me basic familiarity, and I move through the coursework fairly quickly. Then once I'm past a checkpoint, as I have extra time, I slowly level up the stuff I've already completed. Right now most of my coursework is level 2, and the top like 1/5 of it is level 3. So far, this seems to work surprisingly well; it's kindof a crude, guided spaced repetition. The practice feature does actual spaced repetition I think, but I like this guided approach more.

The other key takeaway of course is that the "subject" of a given lesson is a head fake. The vocabulary matches that lesson, but the app is also careful to sneakily introduce grammatical constructs over time as well, and if you don't read the tips (I don't if I can help it), then you end up picking up a lot of those rules organically. For example, "a la" (roughly "to the") condenses to "al" in Spanish, and that was never explicitly taught in a lesson, it was just introduced in a sentence one day. It was confusing... and then it "clicked" and I got a feel for it. That part is very neat.

Anyway, the app certainly isn't for everyone, but as a total beginner who's tried other language learning approaches, mixing Duolingo (for consistent vocabulary acquisition) with organic language sources (in my case: games and TV in Spanish) seems to be really effective. The app may feel easy, but it's working and I can feel my understanding in the organic sources expanding as I go. If nothing else, it also gives me a baseline; I can knock out my 50xp in 20 minutes or so, and I do that every day. I think eventually I'll be able to read at a basic level and then I'll leave Duolingo in the dust, but until then, as a total novice, it's been a good starting point, and that seems to be what it's trying to be.

“a el” condenses to “al”.

You might want to get a book on Spanish grammar to cross-check when you encounter new rules.

Almost all the other nouns are masculine - el carro, el niño, el oso, el barrio, el avión, el camión, el árbol.

Pretty sure with those 2 simple rules you will catch 90% of genders right.

Manus, hand, is one of an even smaller set of feminine fourth declension nouns. I believe this oddity has also been preserved in Spanish as "la mano".

This makes me wonder whether the Spanish words for trees tend to be feminine while having masculine-looking forms; that is regular in Latin.

Just for fun, I tried passing that test in three different languages.

Italian: I don't speak Italian at all, but with cognates and guesswork, I still managed to answer many questions correctly. Not enough to skip any lessons, though.

Japanese: I've been learning Japanese for maybe 6 months and the test result would've let me skip 60% of the course. That's despite the fact that I don't know any vocabulary related to some of those skipped topics (such as clothes).

Chinese: I'm fluent and answered all questions correctly, but was only skipped past 86% of the course.

Yes. As an ad-supported app, the developers overwhelming motivation is to get users to take the next lesson, rather than to progress them toward mastery. The app seems designed to stimulate every reward center in the brain toward that end, the mechanisms for which usually ending up getting in the way of accessing the lesson content efficiently.

At that time each grammar lesson also had a page summarising the rules you were about to learn with examples and explainations.

The point is making a phrase really get memorized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimil

> These are some of my favorite Christmas gifts because they're the only self-teachers I know that work. In just 20 minutes a day -- if you do exactly what they tell you to with the books and accompanying recordings - - then presto! You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan 3-year old.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=502158...

The Japanese course seems to be hated by the reddit crowd for learning the language, but it's been very beneficial to me. At least one reason is that if I stuck to writing the language in a workbook my progress on the language would be glacial. I would physically be able to write the characters better but would know a lot less of the language.

I think this is just a regression that came in as a result of their mobile app push. They expected it to be difficult for new users to get started with input methods, so they replaced typing exercises with word arrangement exercises, this means that the whole answer is just sitting on your screen, which defeats some of the point.

You can fix this by configuring these exercise types to be typing rather than word rearrangement, there's a little toggle IIRC at the bottom of each of this exercise type.

I agree that in the last year or two they seem to have optimized for metrics which do not map well to linguistic attainment. IIRC they used to have speaking exercises, and as far as I'm aware those are gone (maybe they couldn't make them good enough that they weren't making some people worse at speaking).

If I remember correctly you can choose to type in the words, but on mobile it can be easier mechanically to choose the words from the list and place them in order. Later on I think it removes the choice in some tests and has you type full sentences.