Duolingo Revamped Japanese Course

Japanese
#21

I did actually end up quitting Duolingo a few weeks ago. I always made my lessons ‘legendary’, giving them a gold colour, which is a nice visual indicator of ‘yeah, you did it!’. I had done so for all the lessons I’d done.

Then they updated all my courses and nothing was gold anymore. That broke me. It’s a lot of extra work I put in, and just like that, it was all gone.
Sure, it means nothing - I still learned whatever content was there. But it felt like a slap in the face.

I don’t miss the routine of Duolingo at all. I used to do a few lessons right after waking up in order to get my brain going, so now I just play a puzzle game instead (if anyone has any recommendations, let me know!).

As for Duolingo’s funny sentences - I may have a little bit more insight there. Back when courses were still developed by volunteers in the community, I was one such volunteer for the Dutch course. There’s a few reasons for them.

You’re never going to use the silly sentences in real life… but that’s pretty much exactly the point. There are sentences you’re going to hear a thousand times (“Hi, how are you?”) and that means you might be learning a sentence, rather than the parts of it - which you could then apply to new sentences you construct yourself. If you only learn the sentence “Hi, how are you?”, you’re not going to know that “Hi” can also be used in sentences like “Hi, I’m new here.” Silly sentences show you the language in a new way.

And if they’re funny, they might stick better, and you’ll recall them easier. Then you just have to substitute the silliness for whatever you are trying to express.

Of course on the business side of things, the sentences serve a good function too - they set the app apart from others. They are a marketing trick. “Duolingo uses silly sentences to teach language? I gotta see this for myself.” Or: “I want to learn a language… oh hey I heard Duolingo uses silly sentences, let’s see what that’s about”.

No worries, for all the languages I did on Duolingo, I have either a good basis to start from already, or I have access to a native speaker :slight_smile: With the exception of Japanese, but my bookshelf full of Japanese textbooks and the multitude of other online sources has taken care of that :wink:

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#22

Are you responsible for the “here is my number so call me maybe” sentence ? :eyes:
My partner is doing the Dutch course and show me fun sentence all the time.
Duo is the only app he used for nearly 2 years, he started playing beyond good and evil (fully dubbed in dutch) and adding the new vocab in anki a few months ago.
He doesn’t have the time to look for a good app for Dutch as there is sadly very few and Duo was fairly easy to pick up.

#23

It’s all relative… there must be people out there saying “Bunpro is cringe, why don’t you just read Japanese sources instead of foreigners writing about Japanese grammar in English?”

I’d be interested in knowing more about what actually improved in the new course, and how much it covers N5/N4 now compared to before.

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#24

I never mentioned my streak, so I’m not sure whether this question is directed at me. But I did out myself in this thread, so here we go. Disclaimer: it’s all very subjective and I can obviously only speak for myself.

I don’t care about the streak, leagues, awards, badges, and whatnot Duolingo is trying to hook you up on. What I (personally) did find rather useful was the (I’m sorry I don’t know how to phrase it correctly) “vocalisation”? By that I mean that you get to hear the vocab and some (very basic) grammar structures from the very beginning. I’m intentionally not using the word “learn”, because I wouldn’t want to start a debate whether repeated exposure to the same sentences without any grammar explanations counts as learning. Nonetheless, imo, memorising these patterns helps later — when you do start learning grammar.

A silly example. There was this one sentence that came up so often in Duolingo that I memorised it by heart: 一人で踊り続ける。
Later, when I was going through N4 grammar, it helped me immediately memorise the [ます-stem] + 続ける structure, which was extremely useful, because I’m normally quite terrible at remembering which verb forms go with which grammar points :sweat_smile:

Another thing which helped a lot, were these extremely annoying word matching challenges.
I’m not sure how useful Duolingo is for learning kana, since I drilled hiragana and katakana with Tofugu and then switched off romaji right away. But those timed exercises made me get used to reading both hiragana and katakana very FAST :rofl: So no complaints there, either.

Without a doubt, Duolingo’s focus is not on teaching a foreign language, but on making the users play an addictive online game with a side effect of memorising some vocab if one’s lucky and has good memory. The streak is meaningless and even the level doesn’t say much about actual language comprehension. Duolingo claims that the course is aligned to CEFR, but also coyly admits that CEFR covers a broad range of material, whereas the Duo score “is a measure of what you can do with a language you’ve learned so far”. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. For example, according to their “metric” I’m “high B1”, which is nonsense. I’d say I’m approaching N4 — and that with a mix of Bunpro, WaniKani, JapanesePod101, daily reading and biweekly private lessons on italki with Genki — and Duolingo.

Would I sacrifice one of those for Duo? Absolutely not. But the way I see it, it’s not an “either or” question. Sure, you could (theoretically) spend the time you’re spending on Duo on one of those other apps/resources instead, which are — without a single doubt — way more effective in actually “teaching” the language. The thing with those serious resources is, that they are… well, serious. I have found a suitable pace with Bunpro and WaniKani, which leaves me with around 170 and 50 daily reviews respectively, and I know that I wouldn’t be able to do more without burning out quickly (given the full-time job which is already quite exhausting). Private lessons are pricey and are not always easy to schedule, so increasing them is not really an option either. That’s why I see Duolingo as a relaxing practice tool, for when the brain has had its deal of serious input and craves something easy. So, I would argue that it IS better than nothing. But that’s just my opinion.

Will it bring you to fluency? Not in a hundred years, no. My take is that the entire Japanese course wouldn’t even get you as far as N4. Still, I’m convinced that it could be used as a supplementary tool. Highly inefficient, sure. But not without a few perks, the most important one being memorising vocabulary and (partially) pronunciation.

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#25

Tried using their course again after seeing this thread. It seems way more fleshed out, but there’s things that annoy me.

Perfect example is the kanji course and learning something as simple as 一つ. This can mean “one thing”. Duolingo isn’t interested in nuance and only accepts “one”.

It gets worse when they ask you to write the pronounciation. They don’t convert input like Bunpro or WK.

I’ll write “hitotu”, because I’m used to a Romaji keyboard accepting this as ひとつ, Duolingo treats this as incorrect, because it wants literally ‘hitotsu’. If I enable my Romaji keyboard to write the kana, it’ll correct it to 一つ immediately. And that’s also a wrong answer. I’m not interested in having to fumble with my inputs to get through a lesson.

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