[lumiukko]

Sorry, but this is an incredibly ignorant comment. If you can say "the bear is vegetarian", you are most likely able to say "I am vegetarian", too. Everyone of those silly sentences contains words you may or may not need and grammar that you may or may not need. To dismiss those sentences as useless is short-sighted.

[culopatin]

I don’t think you’ve used duolingo much. I do not know how to say anything other than the phrase it throws at me in that moment. So no, I do not know that. The progression in not linear, jumps around a lot, and doesn’t help you understand how the conjugations work, or how to extrapolate he/she/they/I because all I know is the bear, or apple , milk, motor and radio before I can understand that someone is saying hello to me and how to answer.

[lumiukko]

Sorry, coming back to this comment quite late. Duolingo usually offers some introductory notes for each unit, where stuff like this should be described. I agree that the progression in Duolingo could be better and focus on phrases and conversations that occur more likely in daily life, but that's the choice they made. Also note that the example above was in English. There are languages where the extrapolation is more difficult, because of what are prepositions in English, become suffixes, for instance in Finnish or Turkish. Nevertheless, these topics are usually covered with in the first few units, so I really do not understand the criticism on "useless phrases".

In case there really is a language course that does not cover saying "Hello", "How are you?", "I'm good, thanks." in the first 5-10 units or so, I apologize, I was not aware. That should obviously be different.

[culopatin]

Do you work for Duolingo?