Yeah I hate Duolingo. I find it babyish and just a bad way to learn a language. LingQ is grounded in a much better and more mature methodology- listening to and reading actual foreign language content. The hardest thing is learning to understand the spoken language of native speakers. You have to get hundreds and hundreds of hours of it into your ears. If you spent your time in Duolingo playing vocab poker machine, you’ll be a goner in the real world.