Hmm. Those all seem like fairly basic words to know; OK, maybe "spider" isn't as common a word to need, but it is something that comes up in conversation someti

Hmm. Those all seem like fairly basic words to know; OK, maybe "spider" isn't as common a word to need, but it is something that comes up in conversation sometimes. That particular phrase isn't one you're going to have to say very often, but I'd say it would be pretty hard to say you're fluent in a language if you don't know those words. I've been doing Duolingo for French for the past few months, trying to dust off the couple of semesters of French I took in college and get a bit beyond that to maybe get to the point where I can get by. Yes, there is a bit skewed towards things like family relationships, clothes, the house at the beginning; things that might be important if you're living somewhere but possibly less important if you're just visiting. But they are always adding new content, and as the original article points out they just did a revamp to give access to a lot of newer content they hadn't provided access to before. I don't know; a language generally has a huge amount of vocabulary, as well as grammar to learn, and you need to learn it in some order. The main thing I do find lacking is that it's pretty much all translation or transcription of simple sentences, or word matching. I do find these helpful for learning vocabulary and grammar, but they aren't going to lead to fluency. The article does mention that something that they are working on is longer listening comprehension exercises, which I think would help out with that a lot.