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

The really exciting news is their new course on Klingon will be out some day!

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It’s usable on the Desktop as well (running it in Firefox right now), but you need to modify some HTML to get it.

The reason why they didn’t release it right now is probably because you need an actual IME to input Japanese text.
It doesn’t accept roumaji, nor does it convert inputted text like WaniKani.

If you want to try it:

  1. Open the browsers developer tools (most browser use the Ctrl + Shift + I hotkey).
  2. Look for the topbar-language div.
  3. Under this div you should see one or multiple language-choice divs.
  4. For one of them, change the language prefixes to ja (for swedish it would be ja instead of sv) (also change all divs below this one)
  5. Change the content of the span element containing the language name to Japanese
  6. Click the list item and the japanese course should open.
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Is it only to prepare for N5? Does it get any more advanced?

This guy already went through the whole thing and wrote a review of it:

tl:dr – he basically points out dozens of examples of how awful it is and then comes to the conclusion that it’s ok… I’m pretty perplexed.

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Not even close. Even saying it makes it to N5 is a stretch.

I was quite confused by that as well. Spent the whole article bashing the service and ends up giving it a decent 3/5. tf?

You learn about as many kanji as in the first three levels WK

I found a mistake in the placement test.

What was it?

God, I hate polyglots…;),well done!!

What’s really strange is I could use the JP course on the website yesterday (after signing up on iphone) but now the website doesn’t work.

Thanks. I was kind of angry/ disappointed and felt left out in misery. Not so much anymore. Could have wasted a lot of time to pick little extra i don’t know already.

Could be ok for beginners after they fix stupidest things and bugs. No grammar at all seems little weird for beginners but basic things and patterns are actually quite easy to to understand and figuring things out by yourself can be good (if it works lol).

Example: the placement test asked me to construct a sentence containing the word 女の人 by adding each character separately. As I added each character, a voice speaks:
おんな

じん
And the proper reading of the word is never said, leaving me with “おんなのじん” in my head as the reading for 女の人.

Another one: every time you add the particle は, you hear a voice say “ha” …

There were several examples of this in just in a short quiz.

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I had issues as well with the hiragana at the start. It gives you the translation for “four” as よん but when you need to answer, i made a typo - i was marked wrong (rightly so), but it says the correct answer is し

At no point does it ever tell you that the word for four can be read in more than one way.
t’s technically correct but seems a little… off. I don’t know.

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I think that despite all shortcomings we should act like a good people and help Duolingo. Let’s report any mistakes, write suggestions and be helpful community members there :slight_smile: Maybe it’s not a good resource for most of us, but it has potential to help people start and maybe get more into Japanese?

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in knew this would be an issue if Duolingo ever made it to making a Japanese course!

I don’t like how they did deal with this whole thing. They announced release of Japanese language but did just release buggy beta for limited number of people. Instead of acting responsible and saying something like project is delayed and unfortunately we can just release this beta now, they are acting like everything went according to plan. We all know what should happen now if this was righteous world.

I see public spanking as only way they can save their faces at this point.

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I don’t know about you, but in my country if someone falls on their face spectaculary, people help them stand up, not kick them in their guts. And no one does any public spanking. How Duolingo made their course speaks about them, but doesn’t justify any rude behaviour. At least that’s my opinion on righteous world.

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