Duolingo

The best platform for learning languages, which also serves to practice typing and spelling.

Offers to interact in forums and discussions, in addition to doing competitions by points with friends.

The free version has A LOT of ads. If you make 3 mistakes during a lesson, the lesson is failed and you have to watch more ads + take some mini-refresher course. The paid version removes all that, but at 120 per year, which is about as much as Rosetta Stone. They also just keep removing features: grammar hints are gone, discussions to ask for help are gone, feedback on phrases and lessons are gone, meetups are gone, etc.

At the time of writing, they are also reducing the flexibility of the app and forcing you to a "path" upgrade which means you can learn the language only in the way they deem it possible. Only the stage has a topic e.g "talk about your family and yourself". A stage has about 10 lessons, each is repeated about 5 times. The lessons have no description of what you're learning. Is it family? Yourself? Are you learning pronouns? Nothing.

It used to be a good app, but those days are gone.

It seems to get worse every update

OK for a free App, progress is pretty slow but I don't mind, however they are intent on making the Owl increasingly annoying.

If I do pay for an App it won't be this one.

It may be free, but it's far from professional. One may even suspect it's deliberately designed to waste valuable time. Perhaps a well advertised scam even?

Try learning Russian for example. The intro that throws you into a starting point seems to be professional - no faults there. And then you start your first lesson and get whacked by having the words in an incorrect order, although in many examples before the mistake, the site taught alternative ordering many times, and I know my input was correct too. Second day. I get whacked with multiple lies. Russian to English translation lacked a few word buttons. I didn't know what to do. After hitting 'Check' it told me to write broken English - a sentence which made no sense at all. You don't see such an error even on MMO servers where English is required but where mainly Asians play. I reported the mistake. If you do a mistake in your lesson, then at the end your errors will be presented to you again. There's no option for "excuse me, but this is bs, I want to skip this". This way they'll make you learn the incorrect way. So I tried inputting the way they wanted. One of the Russian word translations offered two different variants, which were basically the same and both English word buttons were present too. There was an example before which also suggested "using the other word is okay". I tried the other variant this time, and bam: incorrect...

They seem to lack language professionals there. Or the service is a deliberate joke, powered by aggressive advertising? I didn't check if other languages suffer too or is the service designed around languages of the west. Maybe others are okay.

There's no speech training, at the website at least, nor it has any proper writing lessons: either you click on word buttons or do it the very hard way.

I've used Duolingo for 1.5 years now (approaching a 500 day streak) and it's been a handy tool alongside language lessons. I'll admit I'm starting to get bored and I came here to look for something different...but that's a long time to be engaged with a language app!

They somehow manage to make Duolingo worse with each update…