Here's a kind of secret and totally awesome way to access newspapers.com and other tools like JSTOR, Proquest and ancestry itself: If you're an active participant of Wikipedia, you'll get access to the Wikipedia library:
https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org
You need an account age of 6 month, 500 edits at all and 10 edits in the last month, but that is something you can easily get and you're also doing something for the greater good
There really should be a free and open source alternative for Duolingo. I know that there is Librelingo, but that is currently only doing Spanish for English speakers.