Hi,
I've tried duolingo for about 2 months straight and all I know how to say is rice, american, italian, english, water and some other useless stuff, it doesn't even teach you to write or anything like that. It sucks.
I know the best way to learn a language is to go to a teacher or something, but I prefer not to do that and learn it online.
It will probably be harder for me since my native language is not english and I doubt there's lessons or something online for mandarin in my native language, but I'm willing to try, I know english pretty well.
Use the comprehensible input method.
https://www.vidioma.com/ and https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Chinese have a ton of videos, all grouped by difficulty, pulling from many different mandarin teachers on youtube using this method.
Will have to try this. The hardest part for me will probably be forming the habit to sit there and actively listen. Tried a couple listed as Super Beginner though while the impetus is fresh. Ended up being a nice demonstration that I have retained some Mandarin from my other attempts to learn it because there were things I recognized and went "oh yeah".
For me, I've found the only way to be consistent, is to limit my number of minutes per day. I used to try to do 30m-1h per day, but found that wasn't sustainable, so now I only do 10m of mandarin and 10m of spanish every day, tracking them with a habit-streak app to stay honest.
If you find you can only do 5m per day, that's still better than nothing.
Makes sense, thanks. Better a little something than nothing at all, yeah. That's the mindset I've tried to follow when using apps in the past, more or less.