[rgoulter]

I used DuoLingo for quite some time before using Anki. My experience with Anki was much better.

My experience was that I was much better at recalling vocabulary from using Anki than DL. Possibly because the "yes/no" to DL is at a phrase/sentence level rather than per-word.

Without putting effort in, DL makes it easy to recall what the DuoLingo-defined accepted translation of phrases is. It's easy to fall into the habit of 'gaming' it and just remembering the answer in a very shallow sense.

With Anki, using flashcards of words, the 'effort' you need to put in is being honest about whether you recalled the word.

I felt that when I started using Anki, I was much better at answering DL.