I've been learning Portuguese to near-fluency over the past few years and I've started learning Russian intensively for about a year using a variety of resources but mainly language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise, LingQ and a few others. I currently have a 800+ day streak on Duolingo: https://duome.eu/liofla
I find that Duolingo is the least useful of these apps. Its main advantage is that it's easy and a small commitment if you decide to do one or two lessons every day. For the rest I don't understand why it's so popular. Duolingo's main strength is that it makes you actually construct the language instead of just memorizing individual words or expressions but I'm not super impressed with that either, mainly because in my experience it's very, very common to have a sentence rejected because it didn't match the internal "regexp" used to validate it even though it's perfectly correct (and sometimes these mistakes linger for literally years despite being reported). I actually got a very mediocre result in the placement test for the "French for English speaker" tree despite being a native French speaker who's reasonably fluent in English, mainly because some perfectly correct answers were rejected by the system. That really destroys your confidence when that happens (both in yourself and in the app).
You have a forum to discuss these issue which contains some very valuable information but it's the worst forum software I've ever used bar none, it feels like a teenager's first PHP project in the early 2000's.
Oh and if you use the mobile app it'll have you build the language by selecting one full word at a time, which means that you usually won't have to thing about the conjugations/declensions and just vaguely remember what word means what. It's fine for English, not so much for Russian and its complex declensions and aspect system.
For vocabulary Anki and Memrise easily win because they only do that and they do it well. You can find podcasts aimed at learners of many languages to improve oral comprehension and LingQ is great to improve reading comprehension, although it's expensive for what it is and I feel like you could make a better clone of it in one weekend.
In general I haven't been really impressed by any of these language learning apps, it seems that they really lack the resources to do anything but the bare minimum. It's probably too niche to generate some real R&D.
So overall if you enjoy Duolingo then stick with it, but keep in mind that you probably won't get anywhere just using this app. If I had to recommend only one language learning app it would be Memrise because it's got some decent decks for many languages (including user-contributed ones) although of course you can't learn a language solely by memorizing the dictionary.
I find that Duolingo is the least useful of these apps. Its main advantage is that it's easy and a small commitment if you decide to do one or two lessons every day. For the rest I don't understand why it's so popular. Duolingo's main strength is that it makes you actually construct the language instead of just memorizing individual words or expressions but I'm not super impressed with that either, mainly because in my experience it's very, very common to have a sentence rejected because it didn't match the internal "regexp" used to validate it even though it's perfectly correct (and sometimes these mistakes linger for literally years despite being reported). I actually got a very mediocre result in the placement test for the "French for English speaker" tree despite being a native French speaker who's reasonably fluent in English, mainly because some perfectly correct answers were rejected by the system. That really destroys your confidence when that happens (both in yourself and in the app).
You have a forum to discuss these issue which contains some very valuable information but it's the worst forum software I've ever used bar none, it feels like a teenager's first PHP project in the early 2000's.
Oh and if you use the mobile app it'll have you build the language by selecting one full word at a time, which means that you usually won't have to thing about the conjugations/declensions and just vaguely remember what word means what. It's fine for English, not so much for Russian and its complex declensions and aspect system.
For vocabulary Anki and Memrise easily win because they only do that and they do it well. You can find podcasts aimed at learners of many languages to improve oral comprehension and LingQ is great to improve reading comprehension, although it's expensive for what it is and I feel like you could make a better clone of it in one weekend.
In general I haven't been really impressed by any of these language learning apps, it seems that they really lack the resources to do anything but the bare minimum. It's probably too niche to generate some real R&D.
So overall if you enjoy Duolingo then stick with it, but keep in mind that you probably won't get anywhere just using this app. If I had to recommend only one language learning app it would be Memrise because it's got some decent decks for many languages (including user-contributed ones) although of course you can't learn a language solely by memorizing the dictionary.