Finally! I’ve checked their app every couple months since my grandparents started learning French on the app. The comments have me a little disappointed, but I’ll use any resource to improve my Japanese even a little bit 
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Ah, cool! yeah, we do. Most Norwegians speak English on a fluent level =)
When I took the IELTS English test before traveling to England for studies I got a score that some teachers claimed they wouldn’t even been able to achieve (that test was stupidly hard, full of trick questions rather than testing your proficiency) And I noticed I could both write and understand English better than my British friend (I kept using words he didn’t understand at all, and not cause I used American words, he simply didn’t have the same amount of vocabulary)
So the Japanese people on there where trying to learn Norwegian? I wonder why, we don’t have that much to offer or a strong connection/much in common. We are far away both geographically, linguistic and culture(istic?). But that is very interesting though! But then again, I am highly fascinated by them, so why not mutual facination! Well, I know they love vikings and Norse mythology though, might be connected to that =)
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I’ve always wanted Duolingo to do Japanese, but grammar is definitely its weakest point I feel. It was bad enough going through Swedish not having solid grammar explanations. Luckily my Japanese grammar is much better now so it wont be a problem but I know people are going to complain regardless!
I’m also worried about the kana/kanji teaching - after trying Hebrew and Russian, I don’t think new scripts are the easiest things to teach through Duo, so I think a lot of new people will be put off really quick…
It still seems super interesting though, and I’ll definitely be one of the first to try it out when it releases!
Cool swedish! Yeah our grammar is wierd and a lot of things are unnatural, I’m a native speaker and there’s a lot in swedish grammar that I can’t explain and no teacher I’ve ever had neither.
Not Sure how they would incorporate grammar in duolingo but do you think you need more than basic to get anything out of it? (Particles, sentence structure, tense conjugation)
I’m also an alpha tester for the course. Duolingo sometimes uses the hiragana version instead of the kanji version for some words like わたし、おにいさん, and つくえ. I’m not sure about the reason for it, maybe the hiragana version is more common for native users.
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I tried doing Japanese to English on Duolingo recently…
It did not go well…
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Those are all elementary school kanji (私 and 机 are 6th grade, 兄 is 2nd grade) so it’s not that they’re uncommon for natives. You do see わたし sometimes, but it’s common to use 私.
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For people commenting about grammar, if you’re not already I would suggest using the desktop/mobile website rather than the iOS/Android app as for some reason the grammar explanations don’t show up in the app. The ones in the community courses (those outside the original French/Spanish/German/Italian) that I’ve tried have been very good. I’ve had a Duolingo account since 2012, have mostly used Spanish and Italian but dabbled with a few others to satisfy my language wanderlust. I’m trying to focus exclusively on Japanese at the moment so will be eager to test out the new tree. 
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I’ve been waiting this for so long.
Words cannot describe how I feel right now.
But images can:
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Agreed with @PianoFish - desktop duolingo does offer short grammar explanation before each categories.
I’m just glad there’s additional resources we can use, especially when it’s free 
Well, I for one didn’t even know Duolingo had a desktop version, so I’m glad it was commented here.
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Lol, I tried that too. It was immediately apparent that I did not belong there.
Say this English sentence. Ah man, I totally got this one.
Updated the topic title as the date has gone back a few days.
Here’s an update on the course from yesterday with a little detail on what it will involve.
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Hmm nice gift for my birthday 
I’m also alpha testing it at the moment and there isn’t really much by way of explanation (so if you are learning something new you would have to learn through trial and error until you work out what the answer is). If you are using it alongside other study resources then it will be more effective.
I do hope they make it a bit more consistent though on release. At the moment some issues I notice are where it asks you for example to translate the time into english. So you might enter “the time is 12:30pm” then another question might say translate “the time 12pm into english” and you get marked wrong if you put “the time is 12pm” because the answer expected is “the time is 12 noon”. Just things like that drive me insane lol.
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I just played with the course on my phone. Was not very impressed. It might bring you to N5, but not beyond that for now. There are barely any kanji (and when there is, the voice reads it wrong) . Might be nice for an absolute beginner, but a serious learner is better off with Iknow.
I was initially excited over this… but of course they’ll only have N5 level Japanese. Of course.
What do you mean by that?
I tried to go to it and it says it’s not released yet.
They might be an alpha/beta tester.