Woo! I am now 51% fluent in French (by the rather modest standard of fluency used by Duolingo, I should say.) So eventually you do progress if you keep at it by doing just 20 points a day. (OK, I had a couple days with 30 last week, but no more than that.) Took me less than half a year to go from 49 to 51 too. Or somewhere around that.
One new feature that showed up this year was the occasional appearance of Duo the green owl peeking in from the side of the screen to say: “Keep it up!” “You’re making it look easy!” “Six in a row, look at you go!” Thank you, Duo, for not putting pressure on me or jolting me out of my rhythm … ^_^;
Of course, it is actually Duolingo that goes to great lengths to make it look easy. This is particularly true for the app, not so much the web edition. While the webpages have more explanations of grammar and such, the exercises are quite a bit harder. Not only do you have to type without auto-correction, which makes it hard to get all the accents, but you have more typing exercises in general. On the smartphone app, many exercises consist of just clicking on the right words from a crowd of words to string them together into the correct sentence, and sometimes you just match words or phrases in the two languages. So the app is great for those who want it easy and have a fragile ego. The web is better if you like a challenge. For instance I used to do Swedish on the web when I did that, because otherwise it would be too embarrassingly easy. For French, it is mostly a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into it. (The more effort, the better you learn.) For Hebrew, just finding the characters on the PC keyboard was an adventure, so definitely smartphone / tablet for that one before I gave up.
Making it look easy is probably the only way to keep people like me who don’t have any special motivation to learn a particular language. Now if Japanese appears – which it is supposed to do this summer, but I believe that when I see it – I might actually want to make an effort. I have tried so many times in so many ways to learn some Japanese, but it keeps hovering just out of reach, understanding just scattered words and not being able to read or write them. But Japanese is for the future, if any. If they can make that look easy, I take my hat off. Hey, it is better than tearing my hair off!