How useful is Duolingo for fluency?

[AuroraBorealis]

I don't want to share my age so let's just say it was some point in the last 5 years, I took a German GCSE at my school (which I got a B in), but I'm still not entirely fluent in German and I would like to be. Since I don't have much money, I decided to look for free alternatives. Duolingo was one of them - how useful will this be in making me fluent? Does anyone have experience using this?

I was also thinking I might want to learn Swedish at some point but I think I should learn one language at a time for now.

 

[Gabe]

I don't want to share my age so let's just say it was some point in the last 5 years, I took a German GCSE at my school (which I got a B in), but I'm still not entirely fluent in German and I would like to be. Since I don't have much money, I decided to look for free alternatives. Duolingo was one of them - how useful will this be in making me fluent? Does anyone have experience using this?

I was also thinking I might want to learn Swedish at some point but I think I should learn one language at a time for now.

I noticed this post never got a reply.

Fluency takes a very long time and an extended commitment to achieve. Duolingo will help for sure but to be fluent you will need to speak a huge amount of German and spend a lot of time learning. I'm studying German in university (first year), having got an A at A Level, and I am only reaching a conversational standard now. Of course, there is no need to go to university to learn a language, but you're going to need to invest many many hundreds of hours to reach fluency.