Duolingo

[watervole]

 I've been  playing around with Duolingo  this week to refresh my O-level German.

I'm quite enjoying it, and it is a good way of learning, but I take serious exception to its claim that I'm now 11% fluent in German.   

I've only covered 54 words with it and the coverage of plurals and cases only relates to a small subset of those words.

Have other people used it much?

Does it actually take you to a level where you get genuine language skills, or is it really just a game that teaches you a good set of stock phrases (which are admittedly useful).

Comments

[kotturinn]

I'm using it (and a couple of others, slightly more intermittently) to learn German from scratch. For me it seems to depend on how much you think round the exercises/games. I've found that when I actually think and join the dots I'm learning a reasonable amount about how the language uses building blocks. But I don't know how far it goes - I think I've reached the "22% fluent" flag but I don't yet feel confident enough to try anything in public (except the odd phrase on a friend who is still pretty fluent in what I think I'd call day-to-day transactional German)