People are just plain lazy these days.

Duolingo is probably the best of them. Babbel isn't bad either (but expensive).

You'll get comfortable with basic greetings and maybe a bit more. No app will equip you to converse at length with a native speaker.

if you REALLY want to learn you still have to put in some time. sometimes it can be easy to just take some shortcuts to "reach my goals for the day", but this week I'll hit 900 consecutive days of at least a small lesson and am confident my German will be at least useful when I to travel to a German-speaking country. I'd probably accelerate my training before such a trip, too.
Forcing/encouraging yourself into daily practice means either learning something incremental or repetitive learning, both very important for developing a new language.


The early lessons had notes/comments on a lot of things that helped explain the reasoning/language structure for why a certain word or phrasing was right/wrong. Most of it user generated. As I've advanced in lessons, there is less of that and I'm often having to do some googling to get to "why" when I'm confused sometimes.