memes

The lesson just throws words at you and expects you to figure out how the concept works completely on your own.

Yeah I feel like most of the big language learning apps do this to a degree, but Duolingo is especially lazy about it. They'll justify it by saying "it's the natural way to learn a language" or "this is how native speakers learn the language as children". But like, I'm not a child, I don't care about the "natural way", I just wanna know how to speak the language without sounding like a fucking dunce. I'm an adult now, I understand the overarching structures and concepts of languages like grammar and conjugation. Tell me those rules up front and I promise I will learn the language faster.

That being said, the more "brute force" approach that duolingo and others employ can work, it just takes a really long time of consistent practice to pick up on the subtleties. I think that's part of why they put so much emphasis on the gamification aspect - it keeps people coming back for 1320 days in a row lol, and you figure things out eventually. It's also easier to build lessons around simple flashcard-based exercises, rather than actually figuring out and documenting the rules and structures of a language in the app. It's also way easier to monetize the lessons when they're gamified.

So all that to say, I totally agree with you, Duolingo kinda sucks, but I also kinda understand the reasoning behind why they structure it the way they do.