I've been plugging along in Duolingo now for about a week, tapping out translations to appease the slightly deranged specimen of avian viridity pictured at left. It's not exactly plunge-in-headfirst immersion like I'm used to, but I can't imagine it could hurt anything. The system itself is as streamlined as a greased neutrino, and works just dandy on my iDevice of choice. I would take issue with the lack of up-front and out-in-the-open vocab/grammar lists -- of course this would be solved if I actually bothered to take notes and/or spend 10 seconds on Google -- but Duolingo makes the process of taking a neverending stream of pop quizzes so palatable that it's hard to really fault it.
For no particular reason, I choice to go with Portuguese as a first taste of Duolingo. Unfortunately, this may've been a poor choice when it comes to actually writing a review of same, since the lingo bears such a close resemblance to Spanish/French that it's difficult to tell how well that trippin' bird's actually teaching me. So guess I'll just check in once I start Irish. Or Russian, which is supposedly coming online in the Fall/thenabouts. Once Russian and Yiddish are put up, I will be a happy, happy goy.
