I was musing over writing something when I finish my tree, but thought I should get something written down now, while it is fresh in mind. Here are some thought after passing the last checkpoint (about half way through).

I started with 20 XP/day, but after a while I realized I needed and wanted to do more. I needed more to keep the tree gold and make any progress. I wanted to do more because I was experiencing the good feeling of mastering lessons. The level scale is exponential but XP is linear which I think is to encourage to make your effort go up exponentially over time . This summer I am nearly doing 100 XP per day.

At half way I feel like it is useful to start adding in videos to my studies. I am pretty new to that, so I can't comment on how well it will work, but it seams feasible to try that now and I really want to get better at understanding speech. My ultimate success goal is to be able to watch French movies.

Reading a book still seems out of the question. I am guessing you really need the 2000 most frequent words for 95% comprehension to make reading not be a complete chore.

I hope this gives the newbies some ideas for the future.