Any alternatives to Duolingo for learning French?

It looks like Mauril is an app developed by CBC and (partially) funded by the government.
If you're looking for more resources, specifically in-person, Alliance Française is in multiple cities across the country and offers more advanced lessons AFAIK.
And if you're a PR, classes are offered by the government, fwiw.

If you are interested in trying something different, check out https://www.languagetransfer.org/.

This is a guy who has paid and free courses for learning different languages and french is free.

It is podcast format but I find it a lot better than something like duolingo because this let's you actually hear the language being spoken conversationally a lot more, and instead of focusing on brand new vocabulary, it instead shows you the relationships of words you already know between languages.

For example, I have listened through a few spanish ones from this person (also free), and with what I have learned, I can pick up on what the spanish equivalents of words should be using different rules such as:

• most words in english ending in al are already almost always from latin, so the spanish equivalent of words ending in it just change the stress from the start of the word to the end (REal, versus reAL).
• most words in english ending with ent or ant are the same in spanish but you usually just put an e on the end (important becomes importante)
• most words in english that end with ly instead end with mente (importantly would be become importantemente applying the previous rule and this one)
• most words in english ending with ible or able are the same, but you just pronounce it the spanish way (in spanish, vowels all have a single sound instead of multiple possible sounds generally speaking)
• most english words ending with tion in english are the same in spanish but they end with cion instead (intention becomes intencion, and using previous rules, intentionally I would know to be intencionalmente)
• most english words ending with ation instead end with acion in spanish
• if you have an english word ending with ation, and you remove tion and stick on an R, you suddenly produce the verb form of the spanish word (the ar suffix in spanish is to say 'to' something. So if I know the word complication in english, then I know its complicacion in spanish, therefore "to complicate" something would be "complicar").
• if you append lo to the end of spanish word, it just means "it" (I don't want to complicate it would be "no quiero complicarlo" where quiero just means "I want" and "no" modifies it to "i do not want")

Some of it is vocab stuff as well, but with these rules, you kind of realize that if you speak english, you already have a spanish vocabularly of thousands of words.

Now here is what is amazing. This is a few excerpts from what I have learned from the first 5 episodes for spanish, and there are 90 episodes for free.

I think french is shorter at 40 episodes, but I have had more luck learning language by listening to these than anything else, to the level that i can speak a little with friends to actually learn more.

Can you join your local Alliance Française? If not, I'd suggest searching for services from either Québec or France.

For Japanese, I've done textbooks + anki decks (anki is free on android). I had some French classes decades ago and nothing jumps to mind as to why that wouldn't work. I would supplement with consuming media in the target variety of French as well for pronunciation and the like.