> I’d estimate that I’ve spent maybe 200 hours over three years with it, which has taken me from not knowing a language to being conversationally fluent in that language
This really jumped out at me. 200 hours to get to conversationally fluent is very, very fast: in the CEFR framework, with proper tuition, this generally gets one to about A2 ("elementary").
How closely related is the language you're studying to the language(s) you already know? Do you supplement Duolingo with other resources? And, last but not least, what's your definition of "conversationally fluent"?
I'd bet that the time spent is being underestimated. Duolingo doesn't track time and works in "lessons" containing a series of something like 15 questions each. You can do one of those in less than 10 minutes, but if you do two, you're over 10 minutes. There's no option to do less than a lesson (even "practice" is arranged as if it were a lesson), and bailing in the middle wouldn't be recorded as anything.
That could well be the case. But I suspect that there's also a great deal of variability in what people mean when they say "conversationally fluent". For example, I completed the entire French tree in Duolingo a few years back, and would consider myself nowhere near "conversationally fluent".
This really jumped out at me. 200 hours to get to conversationally fluent is very, very fast: in the CEFR framework, with proper tuition, this generally gets one to about A2 ("elementary").
How closely related is the language you're studying to the language(s) you already know? Do you supplement Duolingo with other resources? And, last but not least, what's your definition of "conversationally fluent"?
https://www.crealangues.com/french-level-adults.htm