Duolingo starting Japanese 18th May (Available for Desktop, iOS & Android)

Apologies if a topic already exists, couldn’t see one.

How do you feel about Duolingo starting a Japanese course soon?

Personally, I’m happy one is finally coming, but I’m three years into learning Japanese now and could have done with it three years ago. However there’s still a chance it could help and be a new fun way to work on daily reviews and progress.

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Can’t hurt to do it when there’s nothing else to do for review.

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I didn’t particularly like duolingo for French. But its better than nothing and free. I’d be interested in anyones feedback if they try it for Japanese.

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I will definitely try it out! I tried it out for Spanish but since I’m already more or less fluent it felt meh but I’m struggling to find a way outside of wanikani to study Japanese that I actually enjoy and doesn’t feel like a chore!

I’ll let you know when it’s out and I’ve tried it out :slight_smile:

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I’m totally in. I did Spanish, German, Greek and Hungarian on Duolingo, and even if I won’t be able to carry conversation about philosophy or science in any of those language, at least I’ll be able to buy bread and ask for directions. I’m curious about how kana and kanji matter will be resolved there. For Greek you had to already know new alphabet to start the course, but Greek is easy in this matter.

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But does it have boob grave?

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Same as you, I also wished it existed 2.5 years ago when I started studying japanese, because I find Duolingo very good for learning the basics of a language.
But since I still do not understand a lot of stuff in japanese, I am looking forward to it! I am confident that it will fill some gaps in my japanese knowledge, especially because it will most likely test us on things that WK does not cover (recalling vocab, oral understanding etc…)

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Another key question for me, will it be in kana and kanji or just romaji? I hope it’s not the latter.

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The whole reason they took so long, according to them, was that they were struggling with how to do the written language… If they just went with all romaji, that would be super lazy and disappointing.

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I’m an alpha tester for the course. It starts off with hiragana and quickly moves into kanji. things like イギリス人です and 学生. Someone was saying it’s the shortest course Duo has right now. Maybe they’ll add to it in the future. Seems good enough for beginners (like me) not sure if anyone past that would be into it. Any grammar explanation is nonexistent at this point. Hopefully it will be good for vocab.

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The lack of grammar was also a problem in the other courses. At least when I used it to learn Italian 4 years ago

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It’s still the same with lack of grammar part. I didn’t noticed it when I was learning Spanish, as I was simultaneously learning it at school, but when I started Hungarian from scratch, I felt there’s not enought “textbook” there. Duolingo hammers sentence patterns into your head, which is great, but Japanese is so different in it’s structure from any of the European languages, that I really wonder how it will be taught.

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Oh, nice to see someone learning Hungarian :thumbsup:

Agglutinative languages are great!

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I’ve been looking forward to it. I use Duolingo for review anyway, I spend 5-10 minutes a day on it to review Spanish.

My good friend is going to use it to start to learn Japanese (he’s already fluent in 3 languages), it will be fun to talk with him in Japanese for practice.

How do you guys get alpha access on duolingo?

Here’s the signup page:

I signed up within hours, but haven’t heard back yet. I can wait though, it’s only a few more weeks.

Alas, looks like they have already closed the invitations form. Oh, well. I guess I will just wait for the beta release.

I didn’t know this was coming but I’m looking forward to it now!

I used Duolingo for German and Norwegian for a while but ended up letting go. I’d be interested in the Japanese one just to get a little practise.

Perhaps when it starts we can create a club on there.

Wow, fun that you went for Norwegian! =D is Norwegian

I’ll probably give it a try, even if it is short. Makes it faster to work through it :wink:

Ah cool. The only thing I still remember how to say is ‘Hvem spiser smørbrød?’. When I went to Norway it seemed like everyone speaks English, but I like the language so I wanted to give it a try. Actually when I was on Lang8 it seemed like a lot of the Japanese users on there were learning Norwegian.