I only joined renshuu later in my journey and I feel like I would have been pretty confused if I started learning here.
Wanted to elaborate on this.
Duolingo basically guides you through everything, while here you get more freedom, but also more responsibility, and tbh it doesn’t help if you don’t know what to study in the first place. So I feel like renshuu is an ideal tool for people who already understand the general structure of Japanese, and at the same time have a clear knowledge of what they need to study and how. It’s like Duolingo is school and Renshuu is college - Duo has to constantly nudge you and it gives you a universal study plan, while Renshuu provides you some great learning tools and it’s your decision whether to use them or how to apply them, here no one will force you or tell you that there is only one way to learn a language. At the same time the fixed schedules and community support are both super helpful. Duolingo definitely lacks the latter one nowadays.
Also if you’re looking for some free Duolingo-adjacent apps, I’d recommend LingoLegend. It has some very strong gamification features and the learning is more customizable than in Duolingo(also doesn’t force you to watch ads every 5 seconds). It has its own cons, like some N1 kanji appearing with 0 explanation and pretty mid sentence practice, but I like how addictive it is, especially if you like games. It’s a pretty dope supplement to Renshuu, since on its own LL is definitely not effective enough.
