>> Did you keep the skills at level 1?

I went through all the levels.

>> What do you think is holding you back?

What was holding me back was: 1. Spoken French goes much faster than the French spoken in the course so I wasn't able to understand most of it.

2. To form a sentence to express yourself in real life is much more difficult than to translate a given English sentence like in DuoLingo.

I agree that to be able to use a language you need to do more than just follow a course like DuoLingo; you have to read books, watch television and most important practice it in real life.