I disagree with your criticism of duolingo to an extent. It is helping me immensely. Out of everything I'm using to learn Spanish, it has been the most important. But as a stand alone tool, it will not work. I don't believe it was ever meant to be stand-alone, honestly, as it seems to encourage you to socialize with other learners, and look up things for yourself - exploring and asking questions about the language while you learn it.

But anyhow, these are the things I've been using in addition to Duolingo:

• Spanish <--> English Dictionary
• StudySpanish.com and About.com Spanish for more in depth grammar
• World of Warcraft, setting my language to Spanish
• Lang-8.com - a place where you can write posts and have native speakers correct your mistakes, and vice versa. It is a language exchange. It kind of takes the embarrassment factor out of it a little bit, since everyone is there to learn and everyone is going to make mistakes.
• Facebook. I follow things like CNN en Espanol and sometimes comment or reply to native speakers there, after reading the articles.
• Netflix Streaming, Television, & DVDs - Watch movies/shows in Spanish or with Spanish subtitles.
• Flashcards. Oh Jesus, so many flashcards.
• Children's Books in Spanish
• Conversing with my bilingual friend (Man, am I lucky to have her available for this)

I am trying to flood myself with the language. I feel I have made so much progress. In World of Warcraft, when I first started, I had to look up every other word and I only knew one verb tense - present. After three months of study, I only have to look up a word or phrase maybe every other sentence, it is so much easier and it encourages me to go even farther.

So yeah, some people will go down the Duolingo tree as fast as possible, retaining nothing and never using it outside of the program, and then think "Hooray, I'm fluent!" But those of us who actually want to be fluent as opposed to being able to simply brag, are going to put in the hard work necessary to achieve that goal. Because the end goal of learning a language isn't to say you did it, but to be able to communicate. I don't think the program deserves criticism because of the way some people decide to use it.

As for me, I'm not fluent yet, not even close, and there are a lot of things I don't know or understand yet, but I'll get there.