[wimagguc]

A huge Duolingo fan and I play every day, but I wonder whether it's actually helping me to learn anything. I've been using it to study mandarin characters for the 3rd year now, but when I actually see Chinese text there's barely anything I recognize.

Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.

[ollysb]

I spent good year using Duolingo, I made steady progress, but only in Duolingo. It hasn't had any impact on my ability to hear/speak the language.

[wbsss4412]

It can be very hard to perceive the progress you’ve made if you aren’t actually putting it into practice.

Speaking from personal experience, if you’ve actually put in substantial time in the last year, you’ll find that a lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.

[globular-toast]

Doing Duolingo every day makes you good at Duolingo.

There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why would it help you learn a language?

[wbsss4412]

I’ve successfully used duolingo to learn multiple languages.

I’ve used it as the way to get started and build a base of vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.

Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never claims it will bring you to full fluency.

[tgb]

I’m studying too mostly on my own for about 2.5 years. I can read a most characters I see in the wild, though that still leaves enough that understanding the text is hard or impossible. OverallI find reading much easier to study than listening. I haven’t used DuoLingo and would recommend HelloChinese instead. But that’s only a few months to half a year of material; you have to move on. After that I used an Anki deck of HSK vocab.

Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem too easy).

Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don’t think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the characters better in my reading as well.

The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps you’re using, just use characters (except for in answers to verify you’re right).

[wbsss4412]

You’ve certainly learned something, but at the level of commitment it’s going to be less than if you put more time into it (yes I’m captain obvious here).

One thing that you will notice is that even if you can’t utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more immersive methods now, you’ll realize that it’s all there under the surface - you’ll very likely make very rapid progress.

[lupire]

what fraction / count of characters from a dictionary do you recognize?

How many characters has Duolingo showed you (if you can get that metric)?