Could not agree more with this. Duolingo is not "fantastic" ever. If you actually want to learn and use a language Duolingo actively works against that goal by teaching you useless vocab, not explaining anything and in some cases teaching you things that are just flatout wrong.

Duolingo is only great if you want to pretend you are learning a language. Yes I am salty because I wasted a year and a half of doing their shit daily before I realised that it was not helping me in the slightest and has actually made things harder for me in the long run as I now have to unlearn some of the trash it has taught me.

Conversely listening to language transfer was like an aha moment. It actually helps teach you the language in a useful, usable way and doesn't just try and get you memorise bullshit phrases and random vocab.

Tldr: Fuck Duolingo, language transfer is king!