The pros and cons of Duolingo

When I start a language like Persian or Arabic, at first it's just noise. I can't even tell where one word ends and the next begins. So I listen first, every morning, while I make breakfast or do my exercises. I listen to a short story two or three times, move on to the next one, and come back to it later. Do you start a new language with listening or reading?

Portuguese should be easy for me. I speak Spanish, and the vocabulary, grammar and word order are almost the same. But when I go to speak Portuguese, Spanish keeps getting in the way. I had the same experience moving from Japanese to Korean, and with Persian words hiding in Arabic. Have you ever found a "similar" language harder than you expected?

What makes language learning content easy? It's not about knowing 97% of the words. That's the goal, not where you start. What helps me most is repetition, short sentences, clear audio, and above all, content I'm genuinely interested in. What kind of content made a new language finally click for you?

Many learners are told to focus on the 1,000 most common words and stop there. I've never done that. In Arabic I now have over 35,000 known words at LingQ, and while I can't use most of them yet, they let me follow podcasts on history and politics and discuss difficult subjects with my tutor. A big vocabulary is my potential in the language. Do you stick to common words, or do you push yourself to learn the rare ones?

Some of my best language learning material came from a random book I pulled off my library shelf. A history of Portugal, a book about Prague, a Swedish novel. A little Portuguese here, a little Czech there, a little Swedish, and it all adds up, like snow that slowly covers the ground. You don’t always need two free hours to make progress. What’s the most useful thing you’ve found by accident while learning a language?