Today is the 400th day of my unbroken streak on Duolingo! I started using Duolingo in December 2023 originally to brush up on my Esperanto, but then pivoted to Spanish when it became clear that we would spend our holidays in Spain in 2024.

Overall, the experience has been quite pleasant. You have to get used to the style of the lessons and to the dozens of ways Duolingo tries to get you to spend more time on the app (and I do use the app; the web-based version works, too, but it seems to me that one tends to receive way fewer XP there than in the app), but it must be said that the courses are quite effective. I certainly felt a lot more secure in Spain with my terrible-tourist-Duolingo-Spanish than without any Spanish at all, and what I had managed to pick up in eight months or so certainly seemed adequate in everyday situations dealing with restaurant waiters and hotel concierges – although it must also be said that many of the people I talked to in Spain were more than eager to switch to English.

The Spanish course on Duolingo seems to be way more carefully prepared than the Esperanto course – which probably comes as no surprise considering that Spanish is the single most popular language on Duolingo and Esperanto is the third-to-least popular or so, so they have an incentive to make the Spanish content really good and not waste too much time on Esperanto. The problem with the Esperanto course was basically that I maxed it out and seemed to be going around in circles for weeks; it's not a difficult language to learn but the exercises were becoming very repetitive and boring. Spanish, of course, is more of a challenge! (They also have Scottish Gaelic and sometimes I think I should be taking that at least for as long as it takes to learn how to pronounce words.)

Two caveats here: I'm using English as the “source language” for both (the language selection on offer starting from German is much narrower), and I'm using the paid version of Duolingo, although it is difficult to say exactly what difference it makes to the content; from a practical POV, with the paid version you can learn however long you want (the free version tends to slow you down artificially) and you don't have problems going to “Legendary” on all units because you have an unlimited supply of “hearts” (in the “Legendary” tests at the end of a block of lessons you lose a heart for every wrong answer and if you only have a few of them to begin with that can really suck – but I have been on the paid plan so long that I don't remember how one got new hearts).

Having said that, what I would like to see is a concise overview of all the grammar content one has learned. I'm keeping separate notes off Duolingo just to keep track of the various verb forms etc., and it would be really nice to have more support in that area. It seems to me that you're mostly supposed to pick up grammar etc. by constant repetition of examples rather than by looking at a conjugation table and memorising that, but I personally wouldn't mind the latter. There are grammar notes as part of the individual lessons but they are piecemeal and more in the spirit of “here's some curious trivia” rather than a systematic overview. What would also be nice is a sorted, searchable list of all the words one has learned so far – I have the impression that I ought to have quite a sizeable vocabulary by now, but it is very difficult to actually practice many of these words to a point where they're really there when you need them. (The Duolingo app has a word-practice mode but that is a little haphazard. As far as XPs go, it is also one of the least worthwhile things you can do on the app.)

Anyway, it's good fun, one may even learn something, and at €100/year it is not really that expensive (try other forms of language classes). Our Spanish holiday has been over for a while, but it's nice to keep going and see how far I can take it – according to Duolingo I'm currently halfway up to A2 level in the European language learning framework and that is good enough for a warm fuzzy feeling.