I've been using Duolingo and Memrise to learn Portuguese (still far from perfectly fluent but I can read and understand the language fairly well now) and I've b

I've been using Duolingo and Memrise to learn Portuguese (still far from perfectly fluent but I can read and understand the language fairly well now) and I've been working on my Russian as well. I currently have a 430day streak in Duolingo and I've finished the entire Portuguese tree (all skills to max level). I really do thing that Duolingo on its own won't get you really far. I always see people recommend it, it seems to be the most popular language learning "app" as far as I can tell, but it's really quite mediocre. The synthetic voices they use are often very awkward and sometimes plain wrong. The intonation is all over the place and very unnatural. The translation-based approach is very simplistic and often limits what you can do. The main problem being that when you want to speak a language fluently you shouldn't translate but construct the language directly. I'm a native French speaker but as I'm writing these words I'm not translating from French, I directly "think in English" for better or worse. This is even worse for language like Russian where the syntax is completely different from English and you have to make a conscious effort to "forget" the English syntax when constructing the Russian translation, otherwise you'll end up with something awkward. The only feature of Duolingo that keeps me going is effectively the streak counter itself. It forces me to do at least a little bit of Portuguese/Russian every day instead of slowly drifting away from my studies. You keep the contact with the language, even if it's in a very limited fashion. However when I have some free time I do some actual language learning, reading grammar lessons, reading articles online, practicing my writing skills on lang-8 or similar websites, listening to podcasts etc... Then I actually make good progress. On the other hand I strongly recommend Memrise. It's just a flashcard application so it's really only good at teaching you vocabulary but it does it very effectively and it's got a bunch of high quality decks available (some made by Memrise themselves, with an actual human speaker pronouncing the words and expressions instead of a bad synthetic voice). Again, on its own it's not enough but for drilling vocab it's really great IMO. There's also the open source Anki but I prefer Memrise overall.