Starting Duolingo about a year prior to moving to a German speaking country me helped a lot. I can have some very basic conversations at the store and understand ~half the words I read. I think I've managed to not fall in the gamification pitfall by taking the "Learning how to learn" class, which was a good learning catalyst.

I'm starting classes now, and after speaking basic German with the teacher during the intro, she was surprised to learn I only used Duolingo. She said most people didn't progress much with Duolingo.