rawdinosaur

When I was in Austria, the show I found easiest to understand was "Mein Mann kann". It was a game show where women bet on how well their husbands could complete a task - things such as number of pushups they could do or number of plants they could name. If you're listening comprehension isn't that good yet, I would watch something you've already watched in English several times so you know the plot and the general idea of what the characters are saying. I love Orphan Black so I've watched the first two series several times in German. I can now hear what they're saying rather than relying on subtitles. It seems like everyone's watched Friends and The Simpsons but comedies often have faster paced dialogue so it's harder to keep up. You can always buy dvds with a German dubbed option - the German amazon has a wide choice.

Do you mean when using the perfect tense? So you'd say "Ich habe [rest of sentence] [past particle of verb]. That's just he way German sentences are constructed.

I like this idea, although I'm afraid my French isn't good enough to complete the crosswords.

I would say this most definitely would not be the best way to learn a language. Audio might help but I think starting out with words that are so similar and sticking pictures of the items next to each other isn't particularly helpful. What you have here is really a 13 word picture dictionary. I'm not quite sure where mnemonics came into the video either.

I've never used Busuu so I can't compare the two apps but I've used duolingo on a daily basis for nearly two years. I would say that duolingo is extremely popular because the developers are constantly looking at data, seeing what affects the retention rates and tweaking the site to make it more appealing to the users. I personally enjoy it because of the gaming aspect - it never feels like I'm studying and I'm not looking at conjugation tables or memorising lists of vocabulary as I would have done at school. I would say it's less effective than a good classroom teacher but duolingo is a lot more engaging than teaching yourself from a textbook. There's audio, instant feedback on mistakes and plenty of people willing to answer your language questions.