My previous post was rather negative, not because I think it is bad to ask for donation when giving a free service. That is fine. What was disgusting was suddenly putting the donation button in a spot people were used to clicking, and then not offering an exit from that page without buying.
What makes this even more puzzling is that the Duolingo on the Web is still free and contains no ads (at least for now). In fact, you can also access www.duolingo.com from a smartphone or tablet. This not only bypasses all ads and donation screens, but also lets you use the smartphone or tablet keyboard for the relevant languages. On a PC, it may be hard to find the special letters that many languages have, since the keyboard shows the letters for your own language. But the on-screen keyboards for mobile phones and tablets can easily be set up to show the letters for the language you are trying to learn, and will often also give you predictions so you don’t need to remember exactly how a word is spelled. (This could be good or bad, I guess, but in some languages such as French it has very little influence on your reading comprehension, only on your writing. If you are mainly going to read anyway, then remembering all the accents is not a priority. And once you have read a thousand books, you are likely going to remember the accents too. Probably.)
Even apart from the keyboard problems and spelling, the web version of Duolingo is a bit harder. The app version has exercises where you just pick words from a list to write a translation, or even just pick matching words or phrases in the two languages. Also if you fail a question, you will get it again at the end of the lesson. In the web version, you will simply lose a progress point and therefore get more questions, but not necessarily the same. So if you think the app version is too easy and the web version is too hard, you may want to try the web version on a tablet or high-resolution smartphone.