I never liked Duolingo anyway. It's a bit stupid, it just teaches you some basic phrases without explaining the grammar behind it. So you're not really learning anything.
And I really hate 'gamification' in general. I love computer games but not gamified learning or exercising etc. It just puts me off.
I actually had it the other way around, I wanted to learn to understand and speak Spanish a lot better. My wife is half Spanish and her family speaks zero English. Anyway started to learn with Duolingo and my Spanish did improve. But after a while I got to a point where most of the mistakes I made where spelling errors. I don't care how to spell in Spanish, I'm not going to write them, I just want to understand it and be able to respond. There is no option (afaik) to just learn the meaning of the words.
Learning Spanish as well via Duolingo, but I feel like it's slowing down and based on this post, looking at alternatives. Have you found one that works better?