China

Yeah, I never really liked Duolingo. It never seemed to actually teach you useful things, unless you were looking at the alphabet section or whatever.

I've been on 小红书 (Rednote) for a year this month and I think it's decent for very soft learning. I've never actually tried to learn the language through the app, but I've picked up plenty stuff through using it. There's plenty of people who put out videos going over language rules and characters too.

My school offers Mandarin classes, the teacher's been there and taught for a year and a half and his wife is Chinese, and they've been okay; certainly more than I could think to do even with effort. I've never really gotten into language learning outside of school, so school learning is the only way I know how. I think at this point I could probably pass the HSK 1 no problem; not so sure about HSK 2, I've never looked for the vocabulary list or anything.

It seems a lot of advice is to watch media containing it; kids shows if you have to; if you see a word or phrase you don't know, write it down and look it up; maybe change your phone to be in Chinese so your forced to see it. I'd also have to assume that one of the better ways might be getting immersed in the language. If you're confident enough, go on chatrooms or even to the country itself.

Hope your learning goes well.