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I had taken some Japanese in high school, and French in college, and later done some Duolingo to try to brush up my French, but then abandoned it. I recently p
by lambda 8y ago
I had taken some Japanese in high school, and French in college, and later done some Duolingo to try to brush up my French, but then abandoned it.
I recently picked it back up again (couple of months ago), and tried doing both Japanese and French. I find the French one much more helpful. The Japanese module is still in beta, and it shows; tapping on one word to look them up if you don't remember them doesn't work well in Japanese but it works fine in French.
And yeah, I found the Japanese curriculum pretty lacking, and the kanji really hard to learn in this format.
I did find an interesting way to practice my hiragana and katakana, though. I created a slide deck using Tinycards (Duolingo's flash-card app, I found it a lot easier to set up and use than Anki even if it's less powerful) in which I would have to write the kana using the handwriting input method for Japanese. I found that actually trying to write out the characters was way more helpful for remembering them then just clicking on the right one out of a list.
However, I couldn't figure out a good way to get Duolingo to give me a list of the kanji I was supposed to have learned by now to use that with kanji, and figured it would be too much of a pain to go back through all of the lessons, write all of that down and then create the flash cards manually from that.
I've quit with the Duolingo Japanese lessons by now, I think I want to wait until they're a little more fully baked, and even then I'll probably need some other outside resources to study along with.
I think Duolingo in its current form is a good way to stay practiced with a language and learn some vocabulary and grammar, but only for some of the languages. However, even for those languages, you will need some other resources to really develop fluency.
- GuiA 8y agoI’ve found WaniKani to be amazing for SRS for kanji. If you are diligent about it you can go through the jouyou set in 18 months or so.
- lambda 8y agoLooks interesting. I think I'd have to be a lot more dedicated to that, and need some other resource for learning grammar, vocabulary, and testing complete sentences. The nice thing about Duolingo for, say, French is that I can kind of mindlessly do it every day to keep my skills up and improve my vocabulary, and then do smaller bouts of studying using other methods to improve actual fluency. But with Japanese, Duolingo just doesn't work very well, and just learning kanji with WaniKani would miss all of the rest of the context, so I'd need something to pair with that for learning the rest of the language. Any recommendations on good resources for learning the actual spoken language to go along with WaniKai?
- stordoff 8y ago> Any recommendations on good resources for learning the actual spoken language to go along with WaniKai? BunPro is pretty good. It's fairly light on its own lessons, but will point in the right direction for material on each grammar point (both online and in the Genki books), and then has a spaced repetition framework for practice/memorising. It also ties into WaniKani fairly well, so that once you've learnt a kanji in WaniKani it will stop showing the furigana so you get kanji practice at the same time.
- magissima 8y agoTae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese is what I used when I was starting out. Iirc it's pretty focused on grammar without a lot of fluff or a specific program, but if you already have a decent grip on grammar generally and like learning in terms of rules and patterns it's excellent.
- apt-get 8y agoWaniKani is a lot more limiting than Anki (which is free and open source) since it has a fixed schedule, while Anki allows you to learn at whatever pace you wish. In addition, it offers next to no customization. There's a WK deck if you really want to use their content.
- lambda 8y agoNext to no customization is what I want for something like this. I want to be able to mindlessly drill for a few minutes a day, not spend a lot of time fiddling with my decks to get them perfect.
- mtgx 8y agoEven though it seems to have a bit different purpose as it offers more structured learning, I find Tiny Cards to be significantly more enjoyable to use than the main Duolingo app. The gamification does play some role in that, but I think it's mainly how the learning is organized.
- lambda 8y agoI found TinyCards to be good for some things, like drilling on kana, but I find that the extra context provided with full sentences and different types of exercises in Duolingo to be better long term. But maybe I haven't found the right card decks in TinyCards yet.