ButterMilk

Hi Zhenni! Your story looks a lot like mine, I also lived in China and struggled with the language, I'm still trying to learn it after all these years.

Maybe we can help each other, I'm avaliable if you want to contact me. It would also be nice to talk to someone who is a native English speaker.

Xie xie!

On 17/03/2016 at 8:25 AM, rawdinosaur said:

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.

This. But I'll expand a little bit: I think spaced repetition is also the key, when you keep seeing the same thing over and over again, after a while it gets absorbed very easily. You not only don't feel like you're learning (very important) but it's also very effective.