Duolingo Revamped Japanese Course

Japanese
#1

Okay, I’m outing myself as a Duolingo user here, but I do enjoy using it to reinforce the basics and I’ve gotta keep my streak alive! (968 days)

Anyway, I got a notice today saying the course has been totally revamped. Initially this was very frustrating, as I am on Level 4.28 and now even though I am still at “4.28”, there is a lot of new content (JLPT N4 Level) in earlier sections that I’ve already “completed” according to the website but I’ve never actually seen before.

So, I reset my entire Japanese course. I’ve skipped ahead to Level 3, because the new content in Levels 1 and 2 is so familiar to me.

Once I got over the blow to my ego, this is for the best for any Duolingo users. The Japanese is of a more difficult standard, and the notes for each section now actually contain helpful tips and grammar points, so it’s better for reinforcing my learning from Bunpro and KanjiStudy.

It’s still not a great teacher. It’s more like buying someone a fish each day rather than teaching them how to fish for themselves, but it does prioritise everyday tourist-type situations. So it won’t help me pass the N5 or N4 like Bunpro does, but i’ll probably end up using more of the Duolingo phrases when I’m on holiday in Japan than Bunpro’s content.

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#2

Thank you for making this thread!
Interresting, I am a duo user too (section 4 unit 55 with 574 day streak ) and I was wondering if I should also reset the course …
But I don’t want to loose all the kana and kanji I did so far, could you confirm that those sections are wiped cleaned too if I reset the course?
I mostly use duo to learn vocaba nd get a bit of grammar on the way by repetition, I am not sure I will survive reworking all the section (I gave up on the previous course rework 4 years ago and made a fresh strat a year and a half ago) as I have gold on everything up to this points and my kanji used to be up to date ( though I use another app to learn them)
I have super BTW use to do between 30 min to an hour daily untill I heard about the course rework 3 months ago and started using more ressources. Now I am down to 15 min a day so I can use bunpro, satori reader and JA sensei.

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#3

Yes, the hiragana, katakana and kanji all reset, which is a shame (unless you’re trying to win the Diamond League, then it’s free real estate lol).

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#4

Damn it…
My days winning the diamond leagues are long gone. Used to reach 15k xp a week now reaching 4k is a miracle haha
I am just trying’to fil all the kanji section and course.
I use to want to make it gold but it’s nearly impossible now with the new vocab.
I will think about it!

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#5

You know what. Let me get back to duo. I almost reached my one year streak on March this year (~300 days) but I ultimately decided that maintaining it wasn’t good for me mentally, especially when pushing through the levels gets a bit repetitive at times (and not that high retention rate, personally).

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#6

I find that doing enough duo each day to hit all the daily targets is a good pace for me. It doesn’t take too much time (15-20 mins a day?) and means I have a few days of SRS-style repetition.

When I try to cram it just to get through it quicker, that’s when I forget stuff and lose the enjoyment.

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#7

I’m also considering resetting the course (was hovering over the button this morning…) but I reeeeaaaally don’t want to re-do making all the kana and kanji gold… I have no more need of winning the diamond league, I’ve got all achievements already lol. But it IS very frustrating to be running into vocab and grammar Duolingo assumes I know when it’s 100% new to me.

I could try to make myself not care about making absolutely everything gold on a reset… but I’m a completionist, so I’m not sure that’s within the realm of possibilities for me :'D

But if you say the course really has gotten better and you’re getting more out of it since resetting…

I’m going to be pondering this conundrum for a while longer I think (and keeping an eye on this thread!)

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#8

“Hello, my name is evbak08 and I’m a Duolingo user” :sweat_smile:

Since we’re all in the same boat here, I’m going to out myself and confess that I actually enjoy the updated course quite a bit. To be clear, I’m aware of all of Duolingo’s shortcomings: the lack of grammar, the non-existent customer support, the total reliance on AI, etc etc… I’ve been using it for 1,5 years now and it was actually my frustration with Duo that pushed me towards Bunpro — which I’m more than grateful for! At the beginning of the year, I realised that despite all the time spent on the app (around 20-40 minutes daily), I didn’t know the first thing about elementary grammar and was basically just learning Duo’s (often nonsensical) sentences by heart.

Having said that, after starting Bunpro, I actually noticed that a lot of Duo’s vocabulary really did stick, which allowed me to finish Bunpo’s N5 vocab and grammar decks in about a month. In turn, going forward with the N4 decks now is helping me with Duolingo :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Especially, the translation exercises have become a piece of cake, whereas earlier I sometimes had to spend up to 15 minutes trying to recall the exact formulations. Because Duo never taught even basic conjugations, not to mention the difference between ichidan and godan verbs.

The update downgraded me from lvl 85 to lvl 83, but I’ve been having lots of fun with the additional content so far! I think previously I stopped getting stories and radio episodes around level 4. Now, Duolingo has added tons of listening exercises with more complex grammar and new vocabulary. To be fair, I understand why people are complaining about the update. It did restructure the whole course and even though it threw some “catching up” lessons, I’m seeing lots of words and phrases in the “reviews” that the old version had never introduced. Some of them, I know from Bunpro, some — from WaniKani, so I’m quite satisfied with the update, but it’s still pretty unfair towards those who use Duo as their main or only resource.

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#9

I was a heavy Duo user back like, 10 years ago (!!!) before they even had Japanese. I was fairly active in the forums (rip :broken_heart:) and dabbled in just about all of the languages and completed a lot of the courses as well (Do they even call them trees anymore?) and I kept a multi-year long streak. I stopped using it at some point and then deleted my account because I hated what it had become: it just didn’t feel the same anymore.

I’m glad to hear that they redid the course, though. Even so, I hope that people who want to do more than dabble or learn the very basics branch out to other resources after they go through the course.

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#10

Well, I reset my Japanese course this morning. Something glitched after finishing a level and it made me re-do all the ‘course update’ lessons, so I figured well… let’s just re-do the whole thing then :'D

Tested out of the first few sections right away, so I’m starting fresh at section 4. On the one hand I’m still a bit sad about all the progress I’ve lost, but on the other I’m looking forward to seeing what has changed.

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#11

Ho no :c
Sorry for your loss progress. I am still on the fence of resetting. Keep us updated !

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#12

Almost a week later, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing by resetting.

The Japanese course definitely improved, and that’s not my main gripe with Duolingo at the moment. It’s a wider thing, which is making me consider quitting Duolingo altogether.

Duolingo has always had a focus on translating rather than really acquiring a language (‘developing your brain’ for that language), and unfortunately I’m only seeing it getting worse. They recently added ‘flashcards’ in normal lessons and while the variation is good, they’re… extremely limited in the answer they accept. There’s quite a few translations Duolingo uses which I just don’t agree with because they only work in very specific contexts, and the flashcards remove all of this context, while still only accepting the answer from the correct context. Not just for Japanese, but for all the languages I’ve been doing daily lessons for. And it’s frustrating, and I don’t feel like it’s improving my skills.

As for the Japanese course specifically, it’s a bit disappointing to see that the kanji learning section hasn’t improved at all. It still just presents a character and has you drill it over and over, without any explanation of what’s actually going on - why is the same character read this way now, but another way later on? Even something as basic as on’yomi and kun’yomi you just have to figure out yourself over time. And maybe there could be some more logical progression in the order in which the kanji are taught - learning 言 before 読 instead of after it, so you’re building on existing knowledge instead of going “oh yeah you probably already know how to write this but we’re going to pretend it’s completely new”.

I don’t know… I’m really hesitant to give up my 1130 day streak, and I do feel like it’s helping me improve my skills in French, German and Spanish without me having to put more effort than a lesson a day into it. But there’s more and more things I’m getting frustrated with, and I know I would improve WAY faster in any language by just putting some proper effort into it.

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#13

コンコルドの誤謬 - heard this in an anime the other day, so I’m excited to use it today :slight_smile:

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#14

I’m noticing a few errors in the revamped Duolingo, both technical and in their content.

I use the website on my phone, rather than the app, and some listening sections fail to load. Often I don’t get credit for completing tasks. It happened a little before the update, but happens a lot now. Almost every day.

In terms of content, I’m on Section 3. There are a lot of unnatural pauses within words, as if Duolingo is using AI that is “doing its best”, rather than human-curated content. Especially in negative past tense I-adjectives: ku na katta.

There are a lot of "は"s pronounced like “ha” instead of the particle form “wa”.

And today I learned the new word “gara” meaning pattern or design. The first time I encountered it was in a sentence as “hennagara”, but Duolingo defined the new word as “nagara” meaning “while”, with the na belonging to gara rather than as a particle following hen, “hen na gara”.

I went offsite to check this sentence and found the correct answer, but there are a few errors like this creeping in.

Their grammar explanations are better than before, but there are sloppy errors.

I am presuming this is down to AI? It seems like the kind of mistake sloppy implementation of AI would make.

Still, I’ve got my 1000 day streak now :joy:

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#15

If it does help you make a choice, my French-learning friend regularly sends me screenshots asking for an explanation (expecting something to be a weird exception as we surely love those) and yet more often than not the answer is “it’s because Duolingo is wrong”. I’m not the first to say this, but I hope you do have another source for learning those languages, as you’re at risk of developing wrong habits by relying solely on Duolingo

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#16

I’m the biggest proponent of “You don’t need to take the quickest route”. Language learning is not a sprint, and you don’t need to become one of those “N1 in 12 months” Youtubers who I largely don’t believe anyhow. Doing something inefficient but doing it consistently, is always better than burning yourself out with the most efficient stack because you overload or because people who had vastly more free-time than you made a recommendation without taking your exhaustion from daily life into account. So normally, I really do my best not to sound elitist. Heck I have friends using Pimsleur of all things for Japanese and I genuinely believe it’s about as inefficient as it can be in order to learn a language, yet they love it, and they make slow and steady progress. Yay! Who am I to criticize them? Of course, I would never criticize them. They’re learning Japanese, which is better than not learning Japanese.

So much for the disclaimer.

The issue with Duolingo is that it’s so comically bad and full of AI-generated slop information that you end up learning a hallucinated language that sounds similar to Japanese. Hence, I’m almost inclined to say it’s better to do nothing than to waste time on Duolingo, if your goal is to learn Japanese.

image
image1080×2340 81.6 KB

source unknown, friend posted it on discord.
AI generated blocks, AI generated translation. Nothing makes sense whatsoever.
My best guess is that the intention was “my newphew is also 20 years old” but I’m not sure

Sorry for the highly toxic post. I realize I’m sounding very unpleasant. I don’t know how to put it better.

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#17

I don’t mean to be rude - my attitude here is meant to be directed towards the company executives of Duolingo, not users like those in this thread.

But I think it’s quite telling that those who “outed” themselves as Duolingo users can’t help but mention their streaks. Duolingo is in the business of selling users the idea that they are learning a language, while offering them a shoddy imitation of the real deal.

The worst part is they do all the sleazy addiction mechanics of a free-to-play game, but justify it by saying it’s for education.

To the users in this thread, if you believe that Duolingo is truly offering you something valuable on your language learning journey, I have a challenge for you. Intentionally lose your streak. Then decide if it’s worth your time, compared to BunPro, WaniKani, Jiten, nihongo-jikan, or even just good old Anki.

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#18

To be fair, the English translation was probably the actual thing that was intended. Way before GenAI was a thing, Duolingo was famous for extremely silly sentences that were written by human course creators. An early one for a language I can’t remember was “Excuse me, I am an apple.” People complained about these nonsensical sentences, but the early userbase thought they were funny!

But now that AI generated sentences are a thing, it’s less funny since you can’t tell whether or not a real person wrote it or was it just generated. sigh It was a very different place back then…

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#19

I think it has value to learn vocabulary and kana, also helps you build an habbit of studying daily which is difficult for a lot of people. So really greatnto start and leern vocab but that’s about it for the japanese course…
But I do agree now that I have Bunpro and other sources it doesn’t look as good as it was when I started and I really don’t like the use of AI…
On the other hand my mom started english from french a year ago doing 30min to an hour daily and she managed to make a reservation entierly in english in a restaurant even asking dor an additional place for a baby seat.
So it still works but I do feel the gamification has worsen lately (I have as much of it turn off).
Also even if I wanted I coudn’t loose my streak because my family and friends would keep buying streak freeze for me haha.
Though to be fair I am considering stopping paying the family plan(and then stop the app as I can’t stand ads), but as we are 6 to pay for it. It’s only 20 € a year.

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#20

Don’t worry, it was a thoughful post.
As Neon says it’s the main issue right now.
We don’t know what’s Ai generated anymore.
They just revamped the course so it’s probably a whole lot.
Other language are bettern to learn there (like english and spanish) but japanese was never a main language and it’s full of errors.
But again if people use Duo to start a habbit of learning then go on an other app it’s great.
I feel like a lot of people using don’t really want to learn a language.
They like the idea of streak and should replace it with the levels that came lately to have a better grasp of their progression.
I used to browse the duo subreddit for a bit and saw multiple people with a year streak actually doing one lesson a day as it is advertised.
So even after a year they didn’t finish the first section of 10 lessons or were just passed it.
It represents around 10 hours of study max.
Worst part is that hose people were annoyed they still couldn’t speak the language even with a year of … 5 daily minutes of commitment …
So yeah, it looks like it use to be a nice app 5 or 6 years ago but the positive is quickly fadding.
I will still use it for now (it’s only 15 mins a day and ok for vocab and kanji ) but will probably drop it when my level surpass it (I am nearing the end of section 4).

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