As per the title,
I’ve noticed in several posts that this thread is anti-Duolingo, so this feels a good place to ask. Lately I’ve been definitely feeling the limitations of Duolingo, but it’s great for what it does. I can cram a few ‘lessons’ in all over the place, and across multiple platforms (I can’t use my phone at work, for example). Pairing it with Anki and Bunpro has made some massive leaps in comprehension, but I’m starting to feel very disenfranchised by the whole ‘pick a few words, get a correct sound effect!’ style of learning when it’s devoid of real context.
For example, I’ve been using Bunpro for a few months now, and it consistently teaches me the actual meaning of stuff I learnt via Duolingo—like, Duolingo will provide “亡くなりました” to teach ‘he died’, but won’t elaborate on how that’s made up from 亡く and なる, or the value of short form verbs / the entire なる conjugation line. It’s the same for constructs like のが上手 or より〜のほうが which Duolingo teaches in a very rote fashion, but doesn’t explain how it’s actually working.
Please don’t assume this is just a generic ‘how do I learn’ post, I feel like I’m doing a great job at that already! I just wanna kick duolingo out of my toolbox and find something that’s a bit more…I don’t know—more like a teacher, rather than a disguised rote-learning ‘game’? Something in the vein of Bunpro (but for vocab / listening) would be awesome.
11 comments
Duolingo is really geared towards western languages and, as you say, doesn’t really explain why sentences are the way they are.
For vocabulary, almost people on this sub use Anki decks with example sentences. I personally don’t. But it works for a lot of people.
I think the anti-Duolingo people are so adamant because plenty of people who post are very allergic to textbook learning because it’s too much like work. And yeah, Japanese is a lot of work. And you just have to accept that. So a lot of people sort of overcompensate in their vitriol toward Duolingo.
An actual teacher. Or at least someone who will interact with you in real time. Most of the language we produce in a day is spontaneous. Reading prompts from an app does not build our skills of actually producing sentences on our own in the context of what’s happening. I’ve taught loads of people who thought they were advanced learners of Japanese who self-taught with duo lingo and wani kani and whatever else, but they couldn’t verbally respond to the most basic questions.
I use Japanese pod 101
Hm. So this is somewhat tangential—I don’t have an app suggestion for you—but I do want to come to Duo Lingo’s defence, just a little bit. Ironically not in the case of Japanese—it’s utter shit. 🤣
I don’t agree with the other comments however—I’m a linguist, have taught ESL in the past and have done a lot of language study in formal settings. I have reasonable proficiency in French and Japanese and I have been using Duo Lingo to practice both as well as learning Spanish and Mandarin from scratch.
Duo Lingo’s strategies are sound and good and I disagree that they are biased towards Western languages. For Spanish and Mandarin, I’m quite pleased with my progress.
The problem is that their Japanese product is like the bastard child that gets no attention. It has no voice recognition like all the others, so it’s completely missing on major aspect of what make Duo Lingo good—actually needing to say stuff sometimes. They often have pronunciation errors their word bank because of misapplied readings and there are often errors in parsing so that wordbank words have been split up incorrectly. *I* can usually sort that out because I had a degree of fluency before starting Duo Lingo but for a new learner they’re going to be either confused or outright mislead. Also they don’t seem to have as many possible variations in translations so it feel more rigid than other languages.
There’s no technical reason their Japanese has to be shit—the pedagogy is sound enough for what Duo Lingo is; the technology is capable of it—it’s just not had the attention it needs. Dunno why.
Renshuu
Renshuu, Italki, Readlang
Get a textbook, apps suck
Duolingo is good for cramming vocab. But as you noticed it doesn’t really teach grammar. And it doesn’t teach vocab in a structured order like you would need for, say, a jlpt test
I like Lingo Deer
Duolingo is kind of trash for learning Japanese, but it’s a good starting point. I’m hoping that as time goes on they’ll continue to make it better.
I started with Duolingo and it helped me learn kana as well as some basic sentence structure. Then I moved on to Anki, genki, and wanikani.
I still pop on to Duolingo when I’m busy and just want 15 minutes of practice, but I don’t pay for it anymore.
I saw Duolingo pronounce アメリカ人, which means “*American*”, as “*America hito*” instead of “*America jin*. This is because 人 which means “*person*”, can be pronounced in multiple different ways. Normally, it’s pronounced as “*hito*” but when you’re talking about people of a country, it’s pronounced “*jin*”.
I don’t know if they fixed it, but that made me have doubts about Duolingo for learning Japanese. It’s still useful to learn some things, but it’s important to have the kanji pronounced correctly.