I’ve been learning Japanese for around 6 months, the first 5 of which were spent exclusively pumping time into duolingo
I feel like it was great for learning kana, hearing the spoken language and memorizing vocab through repetition but at the point I’ve reached now it’s beginning to get frustrating. They will throw 10 new words at me in a single lesson and have me trying to guess the reading of kanji without having seen them before. This most recent lesson, they didn’t bother to explain Te forms of verbs and just jumped right into assuming I know how they work (which thankfully I do since I’ve taken up studying elsewhere)
Essentially I think I’m done with Duolingo since it’s been a huge time sink which is nolonger helpful in alot of cases… That being said, I’m afraid to let go of it since I’ll no longer get the repetition of reading/forming sentences and hearing spoken Japanese. It really has been nice to have something portable I could do with my 1 hour lunch at work.
A month ago I picked up the first Genki textbook/workbook set and it’s been amazing. The grammar concepts that had been only implied by context on duolingo are being explained to me and everything is starting to make way more sense.
The combination of Anki for learning the vocab, reading the textbook, watching tokini andy’s genki videos, and then completing the workbook for each lesson has been super successful for me, but I feel like I need another channel to help me along specifically with listening and speaking.
Has anyone had success with paying for online lessons from italki or similar services? I’m really not at the point quite yet where I can pick up more than a small amount of spoken dialogue from immersion in Japanese media and I’m kind of at a loss for what to do.
TLDR: Duolingo has become disappointing and I’m looking for something to help my listening and speaking skills
by SemanticFox