When to subscribing to Duolingo in August 2020, the main objective was to learn Swedish. With Dutch as my mother-tongue, Swedish is relatively easy to learn. There are more cognates than a native English speaker recognizes. Soon I started dabbling a little into Romanian and Polish, which isn't a good idea. I didn't speak nor understand either of them. Learning one language from scratch is difficult enough as an endeavour for any mortal. I soon logged the Romanian and Polish trees, and there is no trace of them in DuoMe.
If dabbling can be permitted, it ought to be in a language you have at least some notion of.
Eventually I chose Italian (which I once learnt in the early '90's). Refreshing and learning Italian has been welcoming and fun. When continuing Swedish got a bit tedious near the end of the tree, switching over to Italian allowed a 'learning pause' without any streak break. In the mean time, I discovered that it is actually possible to learn a language from my native Dutch. Speaking English and French, the only option was German. I spoke some elementary German from my school days and the initial 47 skill course wasn't a real challenge. The German course was eventually extended to 78 skills, which made me learn something new and refresh long forgotten vocabulary.
Europeans have an inclination to 'laddering': learning a language not from your mother tongue but from some foreign language you happen to speak. Apart from some expats, English is not the mother tongue in continental Europe. Hence, many are 'laddering' by necessity. While cranking up the level of the Swedish tree to gold, there was time for one more experiment: learning a new language from a related one. Portuguese from Spanish seemed to be the obvious choice. There used to be a flaw in the placement test, which allowed skills tested out of to turn gold. This isn't a good idea for learning a 'new' language. Somehow, I needed to deliberately make some mistakes in the placement test to turn the skill level to 1 (dark blue).
I nearly need to apologize for grossing up on crowns with a relatively low total XP count. Learning on the website (instead of the app) partly explains this: the website is stingy on XP: no boosters, no happy hours... Trying to stay in 'diamond' requires avoiding a too competitive environment. Placement tests and chapter transition tests also make a lot of difference: plenty of 'level 1' crowns while earning only few XP. The same accounts for cranking up the crown level after two flawless lessons. This is especially useful early in the tree for a language which isn't completely new to you.
The 'owl gallery' now consists of one L5 golden owl for Swedish, three L3 (red) owls for Italian, German (from Dutch) and Portuguese (from ES). Two more owls are blue of neglect: Italian from French and Portuguese from English. Esperanto and Catalan are 'projects planned or in development'.