Duolingo has a special place in my heart because it helped me bootstrap French from almost literally zero knowledge. I remember my first night learning on Duo,

Duolingo has a special place in my heart because it helped me bootstrap French from almost literally zero knowledge. I remember my first night learning on Duo, having gone through a few lessons and also starting to read « Harry Potter à l'école de Sorciers » painstakingly slowly. In about a year of very much part-time effort, I was able to start going to a local French Meetup which rocketed my comprehension. Now that I'm about ~B2 and able to get by when I go to la Francophonie, I occasionally toy with the idea of picking up another language. But I don't really consider using Duolingo as a great way to start. It seems it's had to reckon with how to turn a profit in lieu of their race-to-the-bottom of crowdsourced translations, which seems to have inevitably turned to ads. When my kids were using it for mostly entertainment purposes, it seemed that whatever efficacy it had may have plummeted. Maybe I'm wrong - I really did like it and I love the idea of it. It just doesn't seem to have fulfilled its promise.