They’ve essentially made it just for tourists who want to speak at restaurants and not be able to read anything. They took out almost all the integrated kanji and have everything for the first half of the entire course in hiragana. It wasn’t a great course before but now its completely worthless.
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Honestly that’s a good thing. The more obvious they make it that it’s not a legitimate learning resource, the fewer learners will waste their time and effort. And for tourists with no ambition to ever be fluent it might actually be a fun thing to do.
So it wasn’t just me. I started a new lesson and was confused by how much more hiragana I was shown. I’ve started taking my learning more seriously in the last weeks and I was thinking to just keep Duolingo on the side to keep my streak going. But if it stays like this, I’ll probably drop it and won’t look back.
>Duolingo just ruined their Japanese course
It’s hard to ruin something that wasn’t good to begin with.
I have to thoroughly disagree here. I really like the redesigned course and it’s a lot more tangible early on. Everything I learn right now I can actually use straight away. Much improved over the super arbitrary sentences before.
Duolingo is well known not to be a “full course”, but rather something to keep you motivated every day, while you also do other things (I do Anki and light immersion, for example). I do absolutely not expect Duolingo alone to make me fluent, or for a ton of Kanji to be taught. But the sentences that they teach now are really useful.
It seems like that’s who it’s marketed towards, the people who aren’t serious and just want a sprinkle of travel Japanese.
It’s just not a product for you anymore. I’d suggest moving on to other forms of study.
>They’ve essentially made it just for tourists who want to speak at restaurants and not be able to read anything.
It was never more than this, and honestly, it didn’t even do this well.
I use the opportunity to abandon Duolingo after a 300 days streak. I’m now studying genki using Tokiniandy online course. Much fast pace, I’m loving it. I did learn over 2000 words with Duolingo though. The main problem is that the pace is way too slow.
Sounds like it’s an actual improvement then. Duo lingo was basically worthless past teaching kana. Assuming the new course teaches some decent travel Japanese it’s a massive improvement, even if it’s removed kanji. Something that can be a distraction if you’re just learning to speak a bit.
My 9 year old uses it just to get sentence repetition in and fiddle around on when hanging out.
I’d say for the sake of an easy source of repetition for basic sentence structure an vocabulary it’s fine.
But she also has finished genki 1 and 2 and is about to start quartet.
If only they had a similarly cute and fun app that was actually geared towards those who are working through the N levels.
I’d pay a membership for a really good one.
Duolingo is currently teaching me kanji like microscope or shintou concepts, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
And I see that a lot of people here are commenting without using Duo at all, which seems an interesting way to know how good or bad it is.
There are a lot of people bashing Duo here, and I just want to point out something that I think is generally understood by people who have used the app for a while but seldom said explicitly in this sub. This post/rant goes super long and is mostly motivated by catharsis, so… if you aren’t interested in a hella long rant about why Duo is rotten down to its bones, just stop reading now.
Even beyond the frequently wrong furigana and wrong automated pronunciation, the screwed up tile unitization (e.g., は こ being incorrectly unitized as はこ), the fact that the Japanese course does not have effective opportunities for new learners to type answers for at least the first 26 lessons and uses a tile matching system that is close to useless, and the added hiragana in the latest update, the app is fundamentally designed to induce a sunk cost feeling to keep you using it for as long as possible in a way that actually goes contrary to efficient language acquisition.
I’m going to take moment to describe the gameified app mechanics in case there is anyone still reading this who has wisely avoided the app. You are given points for finishing modules and points for doing certain review exercises. So far so good. If you get a certain number of points and are in the top x of your “league” your rank up to a higher league. There is a scoreboard that is updating constantly. If you are in the bottom x of your league your rank down to a lower league. There is a top league (Diamond) at which point you no longer rank up but compete for placement. Additionally, you are given in-app incentives to maintain a “streak” (at least one successfully completed lesson per day, every day).
The most efficient point acquisition strategy is to do certain review exercises with a 2x bonus which can be gained through various means, including finishing modules. This is where the approach starts to break down. The most valuable review exercises points-wise are timed exercises that are generally impossible to complete for material that you have not already mastered without paying **real life money** for time extensions, or cashing in in-game points. So if you want to “win” at Duo and maintain a high rank in your Diamond league, you essentially have to review and re-review material that you have already mastered. You are not only disincentivized from learning new material except at a very slow pace to generate 2x bonuses, you are also disincentivized from reviewing material that you are still in the process of mastering.
Now I am sure at this point it is obvious that the winning strategy is not to play. I mean who cares about make believe points anyway? Or made up ranks or leagues? Well unfortunately, a lot of people do. Once you spend a bunch of time in the app, you feel a lot of momentum to keep spending time in the app. If you are the type of person to want a gameified learning experience in the first place, rather than just picking up Genki and Tobira, then you are also probably the type of person who will be irrationally motivated by leagues and points as above.
My point, though, is that there is no fundamental reason why the gameified incentives should go contrary to efficient language acquisition goals, other than corporate greed. It would be trivial to reward review of recent material at a higher premium than old material. Or offer a declining reward based on the accuracy of past answers. And this is where Duo’s incentive structure becomes really clear. **There is no longer a word list accessible to the user**. That is to say, there is no tracking of the words you have learned and your accuracy on each word …. any more. This was apparently a feature that they used to have and took out. I cannot conceive of what learning goal taking this absolutely necessary feature could serve. It makes me wonder if the app developers are actively trying to make the app less useful to motivate a longer relationship with the app. I honestly can’t come up with another explanation for why the developers would do this. How do you efficiently improve at a language if you cannot easily see what areas you are weak on?
So not only does Duo not use SRS, it makes it so that if you want to track your progress word by word, kanji by kanji, and your comparative accuracy on new words and kanji, you have to do it manually or using another tool. And it motivates you to delay your progress learning new and challenging concepts and words through gameified incentives. And the learning experience it provides is at the best of times inferior and frequently just wrong as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread.
TLDR: Duo is rotten right down to its bones. Its fundamental structure and incentives go contrary to any rational goal of efficient language acquisition, and toward a never-ending relationship with the app.
How is it for just seeing random sentences?
I mostly learn via SRS for vocab and Bunpro+Vids+books etc for grammer. Basically following alongside the JLPT (N5 in this case).
I was hoping to use duolingo just to play around with random sentences though in a sorta SRS like way. Just so I have an ongoing amount of simple ones I can read 15 mins a day before I reach N4/N3 and can start more normal material.
But seeing your post today makes me wonder if it can even do that?
After their recent updates I noticed the massive decline in quality. The lessons don’t even cover the topics they’re supposed to cover anymore.
I stopped using Duolingo a while ago when I was at quite a high level. I literally got sentences talking about climate change. Recently I took up Duo again just for fun and got smacked in the face with おんなです while the lesson was marked as ‘making requests’.
Needless to say I stopped using Duo again.
Is there some kind of new update? They have kanji as soon as Unit 6 on my end.
Did they? All I noticed was them seperating the 89~ units into five sections.
My lessons are still the same, lots of new kanji to learn every unit and while they sometimes did force me to use hiragana instead of kanji that I’ve already learned, that was a pretty rare occurance and I haven’t noticed a ramp-up at all…
Any chance it has to do with having the “student” account with infinite lives?
As someone learning Indonesian via duolingo, i can easily say duolingo is flawed as all heck.
Its an ok start but you need to find better learning tools such as friends who speak the language
It’s not a super platform. An example sentence in one of the harder levels is “That doctor drinks coffee at one” except there are no other word tiles to select from and every tile is used in the answer. You can easily answer the question without even looking at the Japanese. You’re just guessing the order. Before this recent update I tried skipping to the hardest levels and it wasn’t hard in either direction to guess the word order without gaining any knowledge at all. There was some value initially long ago at learning some truly basic vocabulary/kanji just reinforcing what was learned elsewhere, but that’s about it for me.
Duolingo got me back into Japanese study in a big way. I needed to review the basics, hiragana, katakana, and basic grammar and sentence structure – I took a semester of college Japanese more than 20 years ago and needed a refresher course. I got to a point where the leagues, “gamification”, and constant reminders were more of an irritation than anything else. Japanese is a really fun, challenging language to learn, and Duolingo took the fun out of it at one point for me.
I don’t want to disparage it for beginners, it’s a fine way to introduce yourself to any language, I even tried the French and Chinese courses, and they were fun.
If you decide you want to go further, there are a lot of other great resources. I’m using Genki I & II right now along with WaniKani to learn kanji. I enjoy it.
I don’t know why people hate it so much. If you use with other things it’s pretty good to memorize random words like names of foods, places, objects etc while doing a lot of repetition on sentence structure and such. Idk if you people wanted to learn Japanese by ONLY doing duo because all the hate is unwarranted in my opinion.
You should be doing something like wanikani for Kanji and expressions using those Kanji. A textbook like genki for proper knowledge to know how the language works structurally. Duolingo for daily repetition and to fill idle times on your day and lots and lots of immersion to know how it is used naturally in conversation.
Funny, I have always thought this about all Duolingo courses… It’s not a path to fluency, it’s a shortcut to — at best — survival / tourist phrases.
Anyone have any recommendations for better services?
Dang, I’ve used Duolingo for like 5 months and found it quite helpful, but I’m now realizing there’s much better options. Does anyone have any textbook recommendations I should use? I’ve heard genki is good, but I’m not sure if there are other ones that are better. I want to be fluent, and I can currently read/write/and understand everything in this: [https://imgur.com/gallery/Te3oYrx](https://imgur.com/gallery/Te3oYrx)
Reading Genki would suit you better
I like “human japanese” it’s a pretty small app but it gets the job done pairing it with Anki/ benkyo(I don’t use this one anymore but I did for like 8 months)
Tbh the Japanese course was never good.
My Dad started learning Japanese on Duolingo, not because he’s serious about it, but just as a way to support me moving to Japan. I don’t expect him to bust out the Genki textbooks, so I think Duo is serving the right purpose in his case. (Although I did have to convince him to start learning hiragana ASAP).
yeah i remember using it originally i think two or three years ago and thinking it felt a bit off with regards to the pacing of throwing in kanji and with a lack of explanations that actually flow with the lessons. got bored and randomly logged back in after all this time despite me not really catching up with my japanese and found that i was able to answer a surprising amount of the questions in the final checkpoint. not pass, but get a surprising amount right.
Their Kanji introduction was incredibly lacking, so the change kind of makes sense
When was this? I’ve been studying in it including today and noticed no difference, it has kanji too
I use it specifically for listening practice
I tried learning it and I’m on course 4 or something and I still haven’t a fucking clue how to speak/read Japanese
I might be the weird one here, but I don’t have a problem with duolingo at all. I just use it as a supplementary learning tool to help reinforce kana and it does introduce kanji as early as unit 5. Turning off romanization + typing in all the answers (someone said you can’t type them in until unit 26?) has legitimately helped. I don’t pay attention to the gameification aspects and ignore them because there’s a difference between maintaining a streak day vs studying for 1hr a day. On the side I’m working with Core 2k/6k with Anki, + Kana memory matching games and listening to vtubers and content to passively absorb words. Trying to type out and transcribe their sentences has helped reinforce stuff. My learning method is probably ineffective, but I’ve been having a good time!
Just my two cents. Duo was definitely never meant to teach you Japanese fluently and I don’t think it ever will. Also never paid for it either.
My course seems to be the same? I’m on Unit 12 and I see kanji for past words. Not that I used it explicitly for study but just as an aside to reinforce learning in a different way. I like to keyboard input writing sentences as well.
Nor duolingo neither any other “language apps” are focused on the learning process itself but just about memorizing basic phrases so you can have an easier comprehension of the language. But no, they aren’t gonna teach you how to really formulate phrases by yourself, or to understand the context about what Japanese people says.
That said, the worst mistake is to solemnly reply on those apps. You should use it as a simple tool, 30 minutes daily max, to help you with some input only, and to diversify a little bit from the actual studies. The best you can do, as a beginner, is to buy a license from WaniKani (really cheap) for learning Kanji and the Minna No Nihongo or Genki 1st volume books (it’ll come with the cds, so you listen to it 30 minutes, at least, daily).