Duolingo is to feel like you're learning not for actually learning.
Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.
For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.
That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.
I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.
Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.
It's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I've had good success with WaniKani[0]. As an aside, the company behind it, Tofugu[1], also have a lot of good free resources.
The main tag line on the WaniKani website, "2000 Kanji. 6000 Vocabulary words. In just over a year." is very optimistic, I'm around level 12 (of 60) after that long. It might be possible to do it all in a year, but you need to put in a lot of work.
Shameless plug: I created a free and open source alternative to WaniKani https://shodoku.app/ using open dictionary data and the same SRS system as anki.
It actually has a very different learning philosophy from WaniKani so it is not really an alternative.
* shodoku teaches writing as well as reading, the point being that writing it helps you remember it.
* You learn components (radicals) and vocabulary at the same time as the associated kanji.
* The order doesn’t need to be by simplicity. This is deviates from both WaniKani and Remembering the kanji.
* You rate your self, just like anki.
I find it is actually more important to learn the kanji in the words you are learning, if a new kanji has three new components, it is not hard to simply learn these new components at the same time (and create a story / connection of them). And learning the reading of the kanji is easier if you learn words containing it. So what I do is I bookmark a couple of words each time I start a new kanji card, and during reading review, if I remember how these words are pronounced, I rate it as good.
Here is my general approach, I attempted to learn Japanese in many different ways and the one I outlined before allowed me to finally break into being conversational.
1. Go through hiraganas a few times (however you prefer, I would write a few down on paper and try to memorise them but now I'd probably just get an Anki deck for it)
2. Once you feel generally comfortable with that, move to words (100 or so) using hiraganas only (try not to get words converted from kanji to hiraganas but actually common words that are always written in hiragana - use ChatGPT to generate a deck for you)
3. Once you feel you arw comfortable, move to the most common 1000 kanjis. There are tons of decks but I really liked the G-Anki one. Go through it once.
4. At this step, you can read and speak much more than you imagine, time to practice it. Here you would move to writing, reading or speaking (depending on personal goals and preferences). I found a tutor which spoke in a way I could understand and that I felt I could relate to (and I wanted to learn a bit of Kansai dialect, so that also helped). I did that on Preply as it is easy to see people's introduction videos and trial a few if needed.
5. As you write, read or speak with natives, every time you use a word you didn't know but you think you should (be picky, add a phrase which seems simple but don't get but don't necessarily add some extremely technical jargon you'd never use ever, at least not for now).
6. Keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint. This stage, if you did the Anki decks daily, you could reach it in 1-2 years, depending on your inclination, how much Japanese you were previously exposed to, etc.
I am now at my 5th year, still learning with anki decks, speaking to my tutor (who became a really good friend) and adding new words. I started reading some short stories fully in Japanese, and almost played through Pokemon Scarlet completely in Japanese. I still cannot follow animes without having to stop and read the text but that's not my goal for now.
Great for telling people you are doing something, that's all.
For me, the best has been to get a anki deck to get the most basic 1000 words, once finished, go find a tutor to speak 1h a week on Preply and then create a personal Anki deck with words you encounter.
That has been the easiest way to improve for me. And this is for Japanese, one of the hardest languages I tried learning.