I find Memrise to be what duolingo ought to have been. I used it to learn about 800 words of portuguese which I then used to travel around parts of portugal whe

I find Memrise to be what duolingo ought to have been. I used it to learn about 800 words of portuguese which I then used to travel around parts of portugal where english was rare. I wasn't having in depth conversations but I could ask for and understand directions, order food, go through stores, etc. I also did some speaking with people on hellolingo and a couple lessons on iTalki which were both a big help. My main gripe is that there aren't any places in the current memrise implementation to use the memorization in practice. It would be great if they would add a "test your knowledge" part for each section where each of the vocab words you just learned are used in ways you haven't seen or combined with stuff you have already learned. I think that's the one thing it is missing to make it a top notch app. Otherwise, I've learned that doing grammar exercises isn't really that valuable until you have a lot of vocabulary and speaking experience (at least for me). memorization and speaking are much more valuable initially.