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by dom111 1445 days ago
Out of interest, what other language learning apps are you using? I'm going to Portugal nest year and learning Portuguese through Duolingo at the moment. It's ok and some stuff is sticking, but I can't help but feel some of the why is missing and I'm just learning how to interpret their questions, rather than learning the language (I guess that's your problem with it?)
2 comments
adastra22 1445 days ago
The ones I’m using now are specific to Japanese (WaniKani and Bunpro), but if you want to level up from Duolingo I would recommend Memrise for a similar bit more effective experience. They have a Portuguese course.

If I were in your shoes, I would do Memrise to fill the little moments throughout the day. But the focus of my studies would be (1) a local community college Portuguese course; (2) the FSI Basic Portuguese course (or another drill heavy course from the 60’s, maybe linguaphone?) for self-study drill practice, 30min a day; and (3) a good sentence deck in Anki, minimum 10 new cards per day.

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jabits 1444 days ago
Idk, I started out using both Memrise and Duolingo in August 2018 for French, used both for a couple of years but now use Duolingo only for French and Italian the last couple of years. I think both are good but prefer Duolingo. But to get conversational I believe you would have to go to more personal methods…
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adastra22 1444 days ago
There’s no app that can build up conversational fluency. You can’t master a thing without actually doing the thing.

SRS apps can be good for building up a vocabulary base. Self-study drill based programs like the old FSI series can be great for internalizing grammar rules so that you don’t have to consciously think about it.

That does give you a great foundation for developing linguistic fluency though, should you relocate to the country or start immersing yourself in native media.

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FalconSensei 1444 days ago
For German I'm using Speakly. What I like about it is that it goes in order of the most used words, and all phrases are actually realistic and something you would use.

There's a streak, but it's so easy to ignore, specially since the app focus on 'learned words', something that duolingo had many years ago. The study is also organized in just chunks of 100. So instead, I focus on how many words I want to learn on the next week/month, or when I'm getting to the next group.

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