I started learning Spanish on Duolingo in January, so 8 months ago. I spend about an hour a day doing lessons on Duolingo, a little more at first when it was more fun, for a total now of 344 hours. CEFR has levels of language learning which are A for beginner, B for intermediate, and C for advanced. These levels can be subdivided, so right now I am on Duolingo level 79, which is right in the middle of level B1. Once you finish level 129, you have finished B2 and could start C1, but Duolingo doesn’t teach C1. C1 is basically fluent. I was happy to finish A2 (Duolingo level 60, so I had just reached B1, early intermediate) just as I was going to Santiago, Chile for a visit, but discovered that I had a pretty hard time with verbal communication, despite a lot of work and knowing a lot of words. Because Duolingo is an app, it has a hard time teaching verbal communication. Written words are easy, including reading, and it is easy to play recordings of Spanish to the user, but although it can listen to you speaking, it doesn’t do a good job of evaluating that. It also isn’t great at having you put together sentences on your own: a common exercise is for you to translate by putting a list of words in the correct order, and it gives you a few extra words to choose from as decoys. That’s not really composition where you have to recall words and the correct form of each word. It also has some exercises where it asks you to write down a free form sentence, but I’m not that confident it always even knows what I am trying to say, so while it makes corrections, they don’t always seem to end up saying what I was trying to say. Plus it rarely tells you why a mistake you make is wrong, and even though I pay for the service at the Super level, because I don’t pay more for Max, it often hides “why” behind a pay wall. I still like Duolingo and it does give some grammar lessons, builds vocabulary, and gives you a lot of time to listen to Spanish. And it can be pretty entertaining, which makes it easier to keep studying. They have lately emphasized more and more AI instead of using actual voice actors and teachers writing lessons. It shows, but they want to make a profit and AI lessons cost them a lot less than human teachers.
The nice thing about Spanish, especially for an English speaker learning Spanish, is there are tons of resources out there. Any time I had a hard time with a concept or word, I could look it up on the internet and find some good help for free (and some bad help for free with tons of intrusive ads; and hidden help for money). I made some note cards to keep up with the conjugations of verbs, which are ridiculously complicated in Spanish. I also keep a spiral notebook where I can write down grammar concepts, things I have picked up, and sentences that I have a hard time with on Duolingo.
There are other resources too. I found a free flashcard app called Anki that lets you build your own flashcard stacks, but also has stacks other people have done and I was very happy to find stacks for Duolingo Spanish for Units 1-4. Currently I am finishing Unit 5 (Unit 5 has been a monster, taking as long as 1-4 put together), so I had start my own stack for that (770 words so far). There is a learning curve to Anki because it has way too many features, but once you have a stack it is easy to do 10-15 minutes of flashcards on the phone app to help keep vocabulary fresh. While Duolingo reviews and uses old words, I am up to about 3,000 words, so lessons aren’t going to incorporate all of that. And since I am not putting my Spanish to practice every day, the cards help me retain and reinforce some of what I have learned.
I found a neat website that has short stories in Spanish at various levels of proficiency, called fluentwithstories.com It has some fun stories and you pick up usage and vocabulary, plus common phrases that people use in everyday conversations.
Duolingo was doing podcasts for a while and has a hundred or so Spanish podcasts that are really good quality and include transcripts. They seem to have stopped doing them, but they are still available in podcast apps like Spotify. The podcasts tell stories, usually with someone (often a journalist) talking about some experience they had and then the host comes in and speaks English a little to keep you on track. It is designed for the intermediate level and there is a decent amount that I don’t understand. The stories take maybe 15 minutes. I will listen to it once and pick up what I can. Then I will read the transcript and look up things I don’t understand. Then I will listen again and read along. Then I will listen again without reading and hopefully catch everything. I like the transcripts. In the Duolingo lessons (in the app, the podcasts are completely separate), they had transcripts for most of their listening stories, but they stopped. I am not sure if they just wanted to get away from that or if they stopped when I got to a certain level. I don’t think it’s that helpful to listen to something and not know what they are saying. Just to pick out certain words, I would have to have them repeat a sentence 3 to 5 times.
With YouTube and the popularity of podcasts, there are tons of podcasts out there, some better than others. One company that specializes in videos is Dreaming Spanish, which I just started using a little. Their approach is that beginners shouldn’t be reading or talking, just listening and absorbing as much as possible. They are all about full immersion. In Thailand we did immersion language training with groups of 3-6 students and 2 teachers, learning 4 or 5 hours per day, no English, with an emphasis on the learners trying to speak. Duolingo is definitely not immersion based, they are always having you translate words between English and Spanish. Immersion tries to get you thinking in the language. So Dreaming Spanish starts from absolutely zero, just like we did in Thailand, using videos that explain visually what the words mean, with some repetition, so you can pick it up, though of course you can watch the video over and over if you want. Just having watched a few, they are pretty entertaining, really emphasizing nonverbal communication to clue you in, which is funny to watch and takes some real talent both in content and their performance. But there aren’t any shortcuts, so they still admit it will take you about 300 hours to get to intermediate, just like it took me on Duolingo. That means they have to produce 300 hours of videos! And usually the videos are about 15 minutes long. That’s a lot of videos! They are doing it though. Somewhere around intermediate they say you can start reading and writing and get into speaking. If you are practicing with a helpful native speaker on your own, they suggest that at first you speak in English and your friend speak in Spanish, which they call crosstalk. They aren’t interested in giving you transcripts on their lessons. They have a lot of free videos through their website, app, and on YouTube, and will even track your progress for free, but if you want access to all of the videos you need to subscribe. Their approach made me feel better about struggling to have conversations in Chile, since they felt like I shouldn’t have been ready for it yet anyway. In Thailand, they wanted us speaking from the start so we could apply it and practice with locals. I never could read a Thai newspaper or watch Thai television shows even though I could carry on a decent conversation in Thai.
Just lately, Google added a new beta feature to the Google Translate app. Their Translate app is amazing and people use it like crazy, including a guy in Customs in Chile so he could ask me stuff. It can use the phone camera to translate a menu. It can even listen to you speak in English, and then speak that in Spanish, basically in real time like a human translator would, though at the airport the guy was typing stuff in. Anyway, the beta feature lets you practice listening and speaking with Google’s AI. Duolingo has a feature like that at their Max level. The beta feature lets you try out certain topics that it suggests, or you can write up a topic. So, for instance, I wrote up a scenario where I would be out walking my dogs and talk to someone about them. I still wasn’t great at coming up with free form sentences, but it seemed like decent practice and it did a good job of recognizing what I was attempting to say. It can also just give you listening exercises, but plenty of places have that already.
I don’t feel like Duolingo is really going to teach you to converse in another language, but it can be a big help towards that goal. Even people who make it all the way through Spanish on Duolingo seem to say that they don’t feel like they are conversant. Finding other resources and doing work on your own will fill in some of the gaps. And ultimately there is no better way to learn than to put it to use, but getting there takes a lot of time.