So I did Spanish on Duolingo for awhile a few years ago, as in the whole way down the tree. In the end I wasn't really satisfied, for several reasons: 1. Hones

So I did Spanish on Duolingo for awhile a few years ago, as in the whole way down the tree. In the end I wasn't really satisfied, for several reasons: 1. Honestly I'm not sure I remember any of it. I found the retention to be pretty terrible. Maybe that's just me; 2. Answers were often obvious with no knowledge of the material. For example, if something is a question and only one of the answers is a question then that's your answer. This is a pretty common problem with tests I find. Test-taking is a skill you can learn, which is useful... for passing tests. Back in college I can remember getting 80%+ in French multiple choice tests knowing nothing about French. Here have been some of my go tos over the years: - With multiple choices where answers are randomly distributed you'll find each answer letter occurs just about as often. So if you have 100 questions with 4 options each but only have 16/90 As, there's a good chance a lot of the remaining answers are A. Yes, test preparers can assign them uneven weights to defeat this. My experience was almost no one did; - One question can give you the answer to a completely unrelated question. So in a language test you may need to conjugate a verb and be unsure about it but another question will have that verb conjugated in a sentence; - So many times I've seen tests where two or more questions are based on the same underlying piece of knowledge that could be one of two things. You answer one question one way and the other one the other so you will get 1 of them right. It's usually better than gambling, which may mean 0. But you may also need to get lucky in which case it might be better to shoot for 2 risking 0 instead. Honestly I think it's tests like these that taught me a lot about managing probability. - Lastly, and this one may seem obvious but it's not for some reason: answer every question no matter how dumb your answer may seem. If it's a freeform answer you may get partial marks for something. It costs you nothing to try. I've occasionally seen multiple choice tests that penalize you for a wrong answer, which requires altering the strategy. I think I've seen this twice, ever, however. But I digress... 3. Likewise where you had to pick words to fill out a sentence, your choices were so limited the answer tended to be obvious. 4. Around that time Duolingo started the pressure to monetize by adding the hearts system, which basically penalized you for getting anything wrong such that you couldn't continue if you made enough errors. This then created the mental barrier of not wanting to get something wrong and googling it to make sure. Just the act of worrying about it was distraction enough; 5. I found the lesson structure to be haphazard, like the topics had pretty random selections of words. I feel like it would've been better if they'd focused on the most common words and phrases used conversationally.