This is where I quit, and I'm going to rant about why now.
I originally downloaded Duolingo mostly out of curiosity. I'm a language teacher with a degree in English linguistics, and I've always wanted to learn the ins and outs of a language that really isn't anything like the Indo-European languages, plus I do have an interest in Japanese culture (no, not Anime). I was also curious how the app did what I do for a living, of course.
That should tell you my first problem - for most normal people, having grammar explained to them is what turns them off learning a language, and Duolingo leans heavily into avoiding that to "keep things fun", but for me, that quickly became a source of frustration. I don't want to figure out new grammatical structures from having 100 examples thrown at me, just tell me how stuff works.
But okay. The repetitive drill exercises did do a good job of teaching me how to read Hiragana, and initially it wasn't too hard to figure things out. The more things progressed, though, and the more the sentence structures started to rely on things that are very unfamiliar if all you know is Indo-European languages, the more frustrating that became. And honestly, I think it was the gameification that helped me stick with it regardless.
What also became obvious is that Duolingo is patient zero for the observation that learning is contextual - I can remember a ton of stuff when I'm on the app, but as soon as I'm looking at something else, it feels like it's mostly gone. To an extent where I actually thought it was funny to see it so clearly, but it does highlight another problem with learning a language on an app - you're really just learning how to game the app, not how to speak the language. The same way I have to be careful to teach my students the actual content and not just how to pass the test, I guess.
So I kept going and kept promising myself I would supplement Duolingo with material that actually works for me, but of course I got lazy and never really did.
What really killed it for me, though, was what's happened in the last few months. Plenty of us have complained about the restructuring of the course resulting in being bombarded with unfamiliar vocab, which now turned gaming the app into basically a guessing game, and doing legendary on old units (which I actually did always find useful for review purposes) flat-out impossible. Now I felt like not only did I not understand anything because the app wouldn't explain grammar, I also didn't understand anything because I was signed up midway through a course I'd not actually done.
And then there are the bugs. The app crashes at least once a day, and for some reason the voice recognition, which was always fine, now also doesn't work properly anymore - some of the time. It seems to be worse during the flash card exercises for some reason, and that's not helped by the fact that those are the exercises most affected by the fact that I don't know half the vocab I'm expected to know.
So I've gone from learning a little and having fun to not learning much and having fun to not even having fun with the app anymore, and it's time to quit. Hopefully I'll work up the motivation to replace it with something more suited to my learning style before I forget everything I've learned because it's not nothing, it just isn't much.