Agreed. Even Seedlang was of limited use to me past a certain point, I just think it did a much better job at the same niche as Duolingo.
For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start.
I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that when I learned other things later on, instead of being actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what it actually meant.
It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was able to bridge the meaning between words and was actually understanding and following entire conversations.
My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I probably should take some courses for that though. But I am at least fluent which is great.
I think this kind of understanding is really important too, if speaking to native speakers of a language.
You're level may be basic and not super fluent, but if you can make yourself understood you can have a conversation. But if your listening comprehension is not good enough and the person is not slowing down (or if it's multiple native speakers speaking at a natural cadence) then you're lost.
For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start.
I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that when I learned other things later on, instead of being actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what it actually meant.
It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was able to bridge the meaning between words and was actually understanding and following entire conversations.
My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I probably should take some courses for that though. But I am at least fluent which is great.