r/duolingospanish

Hey all, I’ve recently finishing building a Soanish speaking app called Rumbo. I’ve been learning Spanish for 10 years on ànd off and never found a way I loved so I’ve built Rumbo (direction). It has a 2-minute test places you precisely on the CEFR scale, then you pick your goal (travel, work, conversation, whatever) and your dialect (Castilian, Mexican, Argentine, Colombian, Costa Rican, or Puerto Rican). Your whole plan is built around those answers, not a generic curriculum. A few things I think genuinely set it apart:

Grammar that explains itself — not just "here's a phrase," but why it works, so you can build sentences you've never seen before instead of just recognizing memorized ones. You produce, not just recognize — AI conversation practice from day one where you actually construct responses, not multiple choice. Dialect-first — pick your variant before lesson one, so you're not learning Castilian and getting blindsided in Mexico

The free mode has a taster lesson, media library, and flashcards, no card needed.

Built this solo, still actively improving it, would love feedback and thoughts, genuinely happy to answer anything about it here. Gracias

For me it was buying plane tickets to Spain in the fall of 2021 for a trip in March 2022. I've been studying in some form every day since. What was the moment for you? And did the deadline actually work, or did the motivation fade once the trip/event passed?

Have any Duolingo Spanish learners (or native Spanish speakers) gotten to section 5/unit 60ish and ran into an exercise where the phrase to be translated was "I haven't visited the state of Virginia" (actual example) and instead of the answer being "No he visitado el estado de Virginia," Duo says the answer is "No conozco el estado de Virginia." Any help would be much appreciated as Duolingo is really bad at explaining what needs to be explained and has no direct help with kind of questions.

I've been doing Duolingo for awhile and have been pretty good at retaining the information and completing the Legendaries. A couple of months ago it updated as it has many times. It recalibrated my progress and removed my legendaries for past lessons. Totally understand, but the issue is that when I go back to do them, I don't know the words or constructions they're testing me on. Doing the reviews barely works because they cover only a tiny part of what the Legendary will test me on. Sometimes I'll do a review for a "past" lesson three or four times and I won't be able to get through the Legendary version at all. I'd like to go through the original lessons again, but I don't see an option for that.

Does anyone have any advice? It makes me not want to do Duolingo anymore because I can't learn what it expects me to already know.

Edit: Thank you for all your help, guess I'm going back and resetting. It'll be helpful to have the course based on my current knowledge.

Idk why, but this weekend, Spanish finally started to click with me and I understood 100% of one of the radio lessons. I'm on day 449 of Spanish on Duolingo and it's all starting to make sense. In no way am I close to fluency, but my confidence is definitely a lot higher than ever, and communicating with native speakers is getting a lot easier. I still make mistakes and still struggle a bit with object pronouns, but I'm finally getting how they work and my biggest hurdle now is just remembering vocabulary and pronunciation. Grammar is still not great, but it's making sense more and more everyday. I feel like I'll be able to reach the level I've been aiming for (broken Spanish) by next year if this trajectory continues.

Don't let the haters say Duolingo doesn't work, because it absolutely can. Duolingo has been pretty much the only tool I've used consistently, although I do use other tools sometimes, including Dreaming Spanish and other YouTube tutorials, but Duolingo has been 99% of my learning other than trying to converse with native speakers.

Trust the process, guys. We'll all get there eventually 🇪🇦🇲🇽🇦🇷🇭🇳🇨🇱🇩🇴