Starting Duolingo about a year prior to moving to a German speaking country me helped a lot. I can have some very basic conversations at the store and understand ~half the words I read. I think I've managed to not fall in the gamification pitfall by taking the "Learning how to learn" class, which was a good learning catalyst.

I'm starting classes now, and after speaking basic German with the teacher during the intro, she was surprised to learn I only used Duolingo. She said most people didn't progress much with Duolingo.

Someone I know has been doing Duolingo every day for 5y for learning German, but their phrase forming and grammar is still quite bad. I think the missing part is speaking the language and trying to make correct phrases.

the largest shock to me is that people are seriously discussing this. it would be interesting to aggregate threads by user reputation to get a better sense of what topics hn is really concerned about and which ones contain mostly fringe opinions.