The same thing happened to me with Duolingo, hahaha... When we were leaving Cuba for Brazil, my wife and I spent four or five months studying Portuguese beforehand, watching some YouTube videos and using Duolingo... and when we arrived in Brazil, it wasn't very helpful. The only thing that saved us was that Spanish and Portuguese are similar... and even then, you still have to be careful what you say because you can offend someone without realizing it, hahaha. Even so, I can tell you that the best way to learn a language is to live with people who speak it. We learned Portuguese here on the fly, and once I lived with a guy who was Italian and I learned some Italian too, although I've practically forgotten it because I never practiced it with anyone again. But living with a native speaker helps a lot, or at least with people who are studying it or something like that.
The same thing happened to me with Duolingo, hahaha... When we were leaving Cuba for Brazil, my wife and I spent four or five months studying Portuguese beforehand, watching some YouTube videos and using Duolingo... and when we arrived in Brazil, it wasn't very helpful. The only thing that saved us was that Spanish and Portuguese are similar... and even then, you still have to be careful what you say because you can offend someone without realizing it, hahaha. Even so, I can tell you that the best way to learn a language is to live with people who speak it. We learned Portuguese here on the fly, and once I lived with a guy who was Italian and I learned some Italian too, although I've practically forgotten it because I never practiced it with anyone again. But living with a native speaker helps a lot, or at least with people who are studying it or something like that.