The clickbait worked for me too. I started with Duolingo, learning Italian, because I knew a few words already and thought it might be good for the failing memory to learn more. I soon lost interest, but discovered that there was Welsh on Duolingo. I had a look out of curiosity and was hooked. After all, it was the language of my grandparents.
My experience of Duolingo is very similar to Dee’s, except that I have never used the app, only a computer. I am currently doing at least the minimum every day because I can’t bear to lose my streak. I do buy a free day when I need to be away. That is a good feature.
Practice sessions are good, though there comes a point where you need to do so much practice to keep the icons gold that there is no time to go on to anything new.
A good point - there can be more than one correct answer. We learned “Dw i eisiau…”, I put in “Dw i’n moyn…” and it was marked as correct. The creators seem very open to adding additional correct answers if they are suggested.
I have mixed feelings about the writing. It is the most difficult, but I think that it does help to fix words in my mind - eventually. Letters with accents are provided for clicking, so there is no need to look up alt-key codes. That would be a killer. (Tried installing Microsoft’s Welsh keyboard but it doesn’t do anything.) There is an allowance for “typos” which I find valuable, though it does let me get away with mutation errors as well as genuine typos.
I have some reservations about the things we learn. I don’t feel that learning Welsh names for English cities has a high priority for me.
I have found the grammatical notes useful.
It was through the Duolingo forum that I found Memrise and then SSiW.
As far as I can see, anyone can put anything on Memrise, so there are lots of courses, some better than others. I find it quite useful for vocabulary practice. Words come back for revision after intervals. If you really don’t want to learn a word then you can ignore it. This is useful if you go mad trying to spell administrative officer. You don’t have to go through step by step as you do with Duolingo. You can get an overview of all the levels and see what words they contain, and learn them out of order if you want.
A problem with Memrise is a lack of flexibility in the answer it accepts. It is frustrating to be marked wrong yet again for something you think is just as correct. There is also a problem if you hop about and dip into several courses. The right answer in one can be the wrong answer in another. There seems to be no allowance for typos. I translated “I work in Tesco”, made a typo in Tesco, and had that sentence coming back for ages. Another time there had been a lot of weather-related words. “Fine” came up for translation. I put “Braf”. This was wrong. They wanted “Iawn”. I could have done with a clue that we were no longer talking about the weather.
Finally, I also had a look at Cwrs Mynediad, but the vocabulary lists put me right off.