It’s really hard to beat flash cards. I like Anki a lot because it codifies them and makes the process of “have I mastered this” a bit more streamlined. Though I feel like a lot of people just download premade decks and while that’s fine you learn a lot making the deck. You can’t get around hours of studying vocab and grammar, especially if you’re after the critical period (which I would hope everyone posting here is)

The gameification that Duolingo brings is valuable and very motivating for a lot of people. The problem is that over the years like many capitalist ventures Duolingo made language learning secondary to earning income. So the primary goal of the app suffers at the expense of keeping you constantly engaged so that you’re far more likely to buy shit even if that means ultimately dont learn all that much

The best language learning system I’ve found is Language Transfer .

It’s free, but it easily beats Duolingo and anything else I have tried (short of total immersion).

I still donate $10/month even though I haven’t used it for a while, because I want it to succeed!