The European alternative is riding your bicycle in one direction for an hour, then talking to the people who live there in their native tongue.

Not gamified, but the best language-learning system I've ever used (sorry if total immersion) is the donation-supported Language Transfer.

Intuitive and not just bunch of rote memorization. Made up of roughly 10-minutes audio files, available in YouTube, SoundCloud, or the simple but elegant app.

The languages available are French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili. All taught by one man, who is Greek-British!

Babbel?

Also there is a leaderboard for Anki which adds Gamification, with Leagues and stuff

WordDive is miles kilometres better than Duolingo but (a) doesn't have the same selection of languages and (b) isn't free. But if you're looking to learn one of the languages they do have and are serious enough that you're willing to pay for a good service, then it's a no-brainer.

I would like to direct your attention to Lingonaut, a project that will have its beta released in the near future. (you will also be able to import you streak from duolingo to Lingonaut).

It will be an app like duolingo except without all the greed, i.e. completely free for anyone (funded by donations, like from myself), no subscription tiers or ads, and it will have, among other things, courses made compeltely by (human) volunteers, course structure like duo used to have, sentence discussions and so on. The developer is based in czechia/uk.

I myself am also a volunteer for the finnish course, but the languages will be released according to how many volunteers there are for each language. The first one out will be Czech.

Speakly (Estonia) not gamified other than stats and streaks but I think its better than duolingo- https://speakly.me/en/about-us
MosaLingua (France) - https://www.mosalingua.com/en/mosalingua-business-solutions/

If you are ok with Canada...
LingQ (Canada) have Challenges you can participate in - https://www.lingq.com/en/about/
Ouinolanguages (Canada) not gamified - https://www.ouinolanguages.com/termsandconditions/

Memrise (UK)

It's a single language and for English speakers, but Practice Portuguese says it's made in Portugal and run by an LDA there.

It has some gamification elements if you want, but isn't intrusive about it if you don't want that.

I've been enjoying Drops. Wikipedia says they're currently a Norwegian company.

Speakly is my favourite from Estonia.

There a few alternatives on Go European

Just type duolingo in the search field.l I did not know, that there are so many language learning apps 🤔

I know about Babbel, but there are so many like Aimigo or Mondly

I also have Mondly installed, but haven't used it much. It's British.

Babbel is pretty good and made in Germany. There's no free/ad-financed version though, only a free trial period before you gotta pay. There's not a whole lot of gamification but it has a streak mechanism like Duolingo which is enough to keep me practicing daily.

Can't find one. Busuu and RosettaStone are Americans (Busuu was first developed in Spain), iTalki and Lingodeer are Chinese

@lopar49 @ueeu Let me wholeheartedly recommend Babbel. Not only does it hail from Berlin, but it also has an actual didactic concept.

Full disclosure: I used to work there, but this is an unpaid ad.

@lopar49 TBH I’d consider attending a traditional, offline language course if it’s available in your neighborhood. An additional advantage of that is that you can meet new people.