Duolingo is surely flawed, but realistically I don't see any other way how I could have progressed in French by spending exactly 3 minutes per day with near-zer

Duolingo is surely flawed, but realistically I don't see any other way how I could have progressed in French by spending exactly 3 minutes per day with near-zero mental effort. I do it on auto pilot before going to bed, usually being dead tired after work. After 1000 days (so like 50 hours) I can have simple conversations, I can read and I have a rather big vocabulary. Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life. I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into. * Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests. * Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit. * Ignore music, math and other courses * Stick to 1 language, at most 2. Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.