[laurieg]

One thing that I notice is missing from most (all?) online language courses is wider context. Not cultural context, but basic grammatical context. Most of them on focus on learning words or sentences.

This is fine for similar languages. When you learn French you can learn that 'the' equals 'le' and 'la' and apply some extra rules to smooth over the differences.

It totally falls down on languages that have less in common. Almost all Japanese natives who speak English struggle with 'the' and 'a'. (this isn't a criticism, just a fact of life). I wonder if part of the problem is that most people learn languages on the sentence level. Read the following sentences:

The man went to the store.

A man went to the store.

Which one is correct? Well, there's certainly nothing grammatically wrong with either, but depending on the situation one or the other could be very misleading, confusing and unnatural. Most people, at least in Japan, learn from textbooks showing examples like this. It tells you absolutely nothing about 'the' and 'a'! So they end up reading huge explanations in their native language and come away thinking 'Wow, foreign languages are hard'.

[leojg]

I agree, I think that an online course on its own is not enought to really learn a language, I view them more as a vocabulary and grammar source.

The context or everyday interactions have to be learned in some other place like forums, conversations, movies, etc

[sharp11]

Great point! That's one of the reasons that I designed SuperCoco (app for learning Spanish) to teach in full context.