Well you seem nice so I’m sorry for the aggression. You weren’t aware that I’ve tried everything else that’s popular. From my position, someone telling me that

Well you seem nice so I’m sorry for the aggression. You weren’t aware that I’ve tried everything else that’s popular. From my position, someone telling me that the only thing that I can even use is “the worst” feels like an attack with the purpose of gatekeeping. My use case is expressly where Duolingo is nice. I simply don’t care enough to invest the effort that Babel or others require. Tutoring isn’t even in the cards considering the time and money. From here, other folks in similar conversations have continued to say that I won’t learn anything with Duolingo. This is blatantly false; I’ve already learned to read a new alphabet, and I’m slowly learning vocabulary and basic grammar. I’m perfectly aware that Duolingo will never make me fluent, and even that I might have some bad habits when I transition to something else. The point is that it gets me to the point that I even can transition to something else. And research shows that the only bad habits that cause real problems in language learning are with pronunciation (something Duolingo is actually particularly good about). Sorry you caught backlash from my frustration.