Nobody ever became conversational in a language by using Duolingo. It's IMO a determent to language learners, because it makes you _feel_ like you're learning something without actually putting together the skills needed to understand even basic native content. Rather than spending time with comprehensible input, people get stuck in the Duo well where they're content to collect rubies and points.
Drop Duolingo, use a proven method like Pimsleur, grab the Anki Core Vocab deck for your language, and start consuming native content ASAP.
This mirrors my experience with Duolingo. I think I did 5 Spanish exercises every day for like a year and can't remember any of it.
What's more, it's easy to guess many answers knowing nothing. Simple things like the only word that's capitalized will be the first word in the answer.
I also remember thinking the vocab for a given topic was really arbitrary too.
Drop Duolingo, use a proven method like Pimsleur, grab the Anki Core Vocab deck for your language, and start consuming native content ASAP.