I've been practicing with Duolingo & Discord servers for about 5 months now and I can pretty confidently say that I can now have conversational level French & had another 7 months on German. My mother language is English so it wasn't that hard to learn these languages, I also had to only play video games in these target languages that im learning and also had to practice by watching movies in those languages with English subtitles & listening to music, memorizing lyrics etc using advanced memory champion methods like memory palaces etc to make mnemonics of words and sentences etc.
Has anyone tried something similar? What was your experience?
So far for me it's been very fun and I enjoyed it. If I had to compare it with the thousands of dollars I had to spend at home working hard to learn academic level English it wasn't as fun or fast as it is right now to speak at a conversational level and my goal is by no means to become a literature academic or anything like that. I don't care to have the perfect proficiency, just to be able to speak and understand is enough for me and so far it seems it's been working in a very cost-effective way