Pimsleur. It’s very different than Duolingo, in that it is almost entirely audio-based. However, at least in my experience, it actually gets you to the point of speaking and understanding a language much more rapidly than Duolingo. Way, way less gamified though. It expects you to put in half an hour a day where you just concentrate on the lesson.

To clone their voice, and to send the audio to some unknown server

Yeah OK, that’s fair. It’s really a shame how dependent notifications are on Google. ALl the other things - Mail, Photos, Drive,… - are a lot easier to replace.

Android without a Google account is great though

As a fellow Futo user: it’s not great out of the box. My biggest recommendations are:

• under Languages and models, download all the voice models (if you use those), transformers, and wordlists you can for your languages
• if you use multiple languages, set the check on “multilingual typing” for ALL of those languages
• this is probably the biggest one: in text prediction -> Advanced Parameters, DRASTICALLY change the values. The original ones are 3.4 and 4.0 for LLM strength and autocorrect threshold, mine are currently set at 28.5 and 0.8, respectively. This takes the autocorrect from “occasionally working” to “as good as SwiftKey” for me.
• Keyboard and Typing -> Long Press -> Show hints. Could not find that for ages so thought I’d add it here.

Also, two super useful shortcuts: you can press the space-bar and move your finger around to move the pointer; and the same for backspace to fine-control what to delete.

Hope this helps, but if not… What additional gripes do you have with it?

I built and configured an Arkenswoop some time in 2023. It’s really nice. However… I have gotten quite fast on a conventional keyboard just by using it over the years, and re-learning that is just so tedious. Every time I try, something with a deadline comes up, and I switch back “temporarily”.

Anyone have experience overcoming this?

I’m sorry, but have you never had actual Cheddar?