Hi Michael, I think Duolingo is great if you are an absolute beginner.

You know, you get familiar with the basics of the language and you can do it in your down time. It's fun, it has a great community that helps you out when things aren't too clear  and it's visually appealing.

Another thing I love about Duolingo, is that it gives you a sense of goals, objectives and a map to chart out where you are in the language learning process. Definitely should be used as a supplement. The trees are a great idea.

However,   one should  leave it as an extra resource when you get any higher than A2, otherwise you will not actually progress.

I totally agree with what Cleiton, and Rafael said above. The applications like Duolingo, ANKI, and Memrise fit for kicking off your language learning journey, but that doesn't mean it is a total package to lead you a fluent speaker. I use "Memrise" for vocabulary study. It's a flash card application offering spelling correction, pronunciation samples like ANKI. However the essential part to become fluent speaker, or communicator, you need to be engaged in direct communication with local people as possible as you can.

I know it might not be easy, but for the preparation there are bunch of the sources provided by major broadcasting stations in the countries like TV5/RFI in France, CCTV International in China, arirang TV in Korea and so forth. That could be your next step to get more sources to enhance your learning.

Hi Michael.

I am on Duolingo more than 470 days now and finished Spanish and French (using English language, because I am Czech and for Czech language there is only English so far). Both website and mobile application are great for motivation and it gives you perfect goal - to do each day some lesson and to finish whole course. It makes you to keep training sentences which you've learned once and when you will finish the course and you will feel like it was not enough, best what you can do is to repeat all lessons once again, but to speak more and more instead of just reading (yeah - on the first round - you will probably rather read and trying to understand at all, but second time you will find yourself getting used to the sentences and able to speak and to use them more and more). When you will be doing the course on Duolingo, work on the language by other learning methods as well for good pronounciation - for sure learn some favorite songs by heart and read some simple children stories out loud. Keep walking with audio sentences and words spoken by native speaker in headphones and try to repeat each with the best pronounciation. You will see that you will get used to the language natural way and when you will finish the Duolingo course, you will be eager to start to be talking with somebody to learn conversation habbits.

I finished my Duolingo tree (English -> Spanish), it was definitely a great introduction to the language but for it to really be effective I think you need to use it more as a supplement to your other ways of learning. I found a lot of the time it introduced subjects & tenses a bit randomly and in isolation. Good for awareness but not so good for understanding.

The community is great though, probably learnt just as much from them in the comments & discussions sections.

yo en  ocasiones utilizo Duolingo para practicar y repasar  francés e inglés, pienso que es una buena herramienta.   :)