5 years of Duolingo summarized

[everything I wrote is from the perspective of someone using only Duolingo for languages]

I do german Duolingo on and off for around 5 years. My current streak is 1721 and I've been very dedicated on the last couple of years, since I have a professional goal with the language.

The current pacing of the app is completely different from what it used to be. You could select which modules you wanted to go deeper and you had no mandatory reading exercises.

As the things are now, you can't skim through a module that you know well, you have to mind numbingly chew through it.

If you are planning on learning a language for professional purposes, I do not recommend it. Use it as a daily task to keep yourself a little productive for a couple of minutes each day, some cognitive stimulus, if you will.

The design as it is today makes you feel like there is progress, but it really makes you further from your goals than closer.

If you are sitting and focusing on learning a language, you will yield better results from a guided book or maybe another app.

The module skipping is a scam. You basically have to ace everything and leave your mistakes for the written questions, because you will get most wrong due to the app not accepting lots of valid answers that are more natural to the human mind than what it would be expected from you to write without doing the module and seeing how it formulates.

The only thing keeping me going is that it has only 2.5 modules and I will be done with it.

So, summarizing it all: I think Duolingo is a neat daily quest for people with a couple of minutes to kill during daily activities.

If you need/want to be efficient, look for something else.