I don’t put my trips and family vacations on social media because the kids at Klara’s school have different lives, and it would be horrible, embarrassing showing off. Of course, Klara tells her friends but children have a way of processing such things through play that renders them normal.
As a result, my only outlet is here, and I’m happy to report that N and Klara are coming with me to Spain for the first time this summer. N is already learning Spanish on Duolingo. This was 100% his idea because I have given up on teaching languages to husbands since the first effort ended up in a divorce.
The opportunity to bring together such central parts of my life is exhilarating.
Clarissa's Blog 
I have been in a similar situation re: teaching language to a spouse and I agree that all initiative must come from them or it goes badly. Though if I were in your situation I would find it very hard not to try to steer him away from Duolingo and towards something a bit more conversational like Babbel or Mango. Perhaps you can have some recommendations ready for the first time he complains about Duolingo teaching weird, random things.
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This is great advice, thank you. I’m very ignorant about digital language learning systems and have no idea which ones are better.
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Duolingo is incredibly popular and has a bunch of gamified elements that do seem to be good at encouraging people to keep doing it every day. But Duolingo is very heavy into random sentences and random vocabulary, there’s not much about it that is conversational and there’s no effort to really explain grammatical structure or providing any sort of cultural content. Rosetta Stone is even worse, it’s basically just really fancy flash cards. I don’t think either would be harmful to a learner, but there are far better things out there for most languages so I view them as a waste of time. (I do have a language teaching friend who has been learning Welsh on Duolingo who knows that it is pedagogically flawed, but none of the better platforms offer Welsh content.)
Of the app based things out there, I like Babbel the best. There is a small monthly fee to use it, but It’s built around simple conversations and includes simple grammar explanations, the vocabulary and structures it teaches at the beginning levels are things beginners might actually be able to use on a trip. Mango is also conversational and it is available for free through lots of public libraries. I would imagine that there are also good things available on YouTube for learning Spanish. There are tons of people producing content for German learners and several of them are really good.
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I can second that. I stopped trying to use DL with my kids, because their recall outside the program was zero, and the dopamine-hacking in that program is so intense they were having emotional meltdowns about not getting their “streak” if they didn’t log in on weekends. We have also used Rosetta Stone, and while they did not have the emotional hacking problem that DL has, recall was still pretty terrible. We have had better results with a combination of short translation exercises from target-language children’s books (the library often has them), and using YT for listening exercises where we basically watch a short video, in the target language, on a topic the kids are interested in, and just have them write down a list of words they heard: words they knew, words they didn’t know but had a good guess at the spelling, phrases they heard more than once. Then afterward we look up any that weren’t already familiar.
This is probably not ideal, but so far it’s the best we’ve been able to do.
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