renaissance poisson

i started on duolingo yesterday and decided to take french from the very beginning, just like on memrise.

and i am having the opposite impression of how the two compare. the progression is much more sensible on memrise. basic greetings, please and thank you, pronouns, "to be" and "to have" conjugated with pronouns and negatives and phrased as questions, where you might be from, ordering a few beverages. this is pretty obviously geared towards the traveller, but it's all good stuff to know. if i didn't know the grammar yet, i think i could actually derive much of it from the progression.

on duolingo i got man/woman/boy/girl/child, cat, dress, apple, letter, book, red/black, eat, some pronouns, random presentation of some conjugations of "to be" in a way that wouldn't allow me to easily derive grammatical rules. i am served "rich" and "calm" because they're cognates with english, but i don't really care about cognates at this time -- and neither "rich" nor "calm" are words i feel i need to know in my first 3 lessons. it feels incredibly messy, and i have no idea who the target population is supposed to be. i vastly prefer memrise in this regard.

technically duolingo gets one point -- images help anchor vocabulary; i wish memrise had those (though duolingo's images are not particularly good; not simple representations on a clean background, but like they're taken randomly from google images and shrunk down). the interface is cleaner on memrise, progression to the next item is automatic while in a lesson (duolingo makes me click too much). the types of exercises vary slightly; i like memrise's a little better. duolingo makes me type a lot of english translation (thanks, i already know how to write english), memrise always uses a different exercise type when i have to translate into english, i only type french. memrise speaks everything for me without me having to click on anything. oh! worst of all, duolingo uses a synthesized voice which does not sound particularly natural to me, while memrise uses recordings of different native speakers.

i haven't interacted with any community at all yet -- it sounds like duolingo might have an advantage there.

i have previously used anki on my own computer, which is great for making my own flash cards, and it can now include images, sound, and stroke order (useful for kanji). i'm not unhappy with it, i am just trying the online sites to see whether the enhanced gamification will give me something worthwhile.

thanks for the other two mentions; i'll check those out too.