Off topic, but you were kicked out of a club for losing a streak in Duolingo? Isn’t that a little…harsh? Especially for something like language learning, which probably a large number of us are just doing for fun.
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What are crown levels? It’s been a while since I used duolingo and I’m intrigued! From your comments they certainly don’t sound like a great feature…
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I’m going to do a p&$$-poor job at explaining it, most likely, but this is a summation of me checking out JP Duolingo a few months ago:
I started the course new, and saw that I could take a small test to skip that particular level. Aced the test, and that got me 1 out of 5 gold crown levels.
Me: “Oh! Interesting! Every lesson as five “levels” worth of stuff in it? Okay, I’ll do the second test for the fist lesson instead of moving on to lesson two, to see how these subsequent crowns scale up. …it’s the exact same content from the first crown test. That’s weird. I’ll try the third crown test. …It’s the exact same content…?”
For some reason, to get full “crowns” on everything, you have to rehash the exact, identical content five times in a row if you want to feel some sense of completion. Maybe they ask you to identify a word EN-JP the first time around, and JP-EN the second. But it was mind-numbingly repetitive. And if you ignore the crowns, your lesson tree becomes this mess of incomplete-looking things, showing nothing but 1/5’s.
Shoddy explanations aside: the gripe that bothered me a lot:
You can input kanji even when they are only showing things in kana. …most of the time. I quit when it became more and more frequent in the first few levels that a kanji was accepted a few times, but with one variation, it wasn’t set in the system as an acceptable answer.
For example: Just translate the word dog as 犬 - fine.
Translate the sentence this is a dog to これは犬だ - wrong, the correct answer showing that I should have written いぬ instead.
So certain things are not yet properly and consistently implemented.
And I know I’m a novice, but… does anyone else think the audio is pretty borked? It often doesn’t sound natural to me.
My wife used DuoLingo for Dutch (my native language) and I would often be shouting at the app that they pronounce things 100%, categorically wrong. Especially when it comes to sentences, because they seem to chop up audio and Frankenstein it together, making the speed and cadence so horribly off, that no Dutch person would know what you’re saying if you mimic off DuoLingo.
When the JP audio also sounded weird to me, I just dropped it. If it teaches me JP half as messed up as it teaches people Dutch, I don’t want it.
- As I said: this is from a few months ago - don’t know how much has changed.
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I do agree with the crown levels making it feel incomplete. I didn’t update my app for ages so it’s only recently that I came across them. And honestly it takes away the feeling of accomplishment from just completing all the lessons. The previous system they had in which you were able to gold something that the app considered to be well in your memory was in my opinion better.
Thanks for the warning about pronunciation, I don’t often use sound so I haven’t noticed it. But it’s good to keep an eye on 
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Thanks very much for the answer!
Interesting… that does sound pretty tedious. I always thought testing out was supposed to fully ‘tick off’ the content you tested out of.
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Same here. That’s why I was so confused. I got full marks, but then only cleared crown-level 1 out of 5 on that lesson. I assumed it meant the lesson had other content, why leave it marked as incomplete otherwise? But I guess they only deem it properly learned when you have repeated the identical information five times in a row, whether it be by going over it regularly, or with the test-out option.
Makes no real sense to me.
To be fair; testing out of the first crown-level of a lesson did open up the next lesson. It is possible to keep progressing even without the tedious repetition, as far as I could see. It just means that nothing ever gets checked off as fully completed.
Compounding that with my mistrust of their audio quality, I decided not to continue. I don’t feel a need to get exposure to Japanese that isn’t close enough to the real deal. Though people still using the app will know better than me if the audio is (still) off.
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Is this the mural?
I’ve used duolingo for other languages and found it pretty helpful but I didn’t really like the japanese course? I think it could be good for testing sentence structure like others have said but I just found it boring as most of the vocab/sentences were things you’d never really say or come across. Also I hate the new format where you have to spend ages on one topic to complete it, you feel like you haven’t achieved anything?
I do use memrise quite a lot to learn vocab, I like the fact you can ignore certain words/topics so you can skip stuff you already know, and they have good courses for learning hiragana/katakana as well as vocab which is useful, I tend to use the courses that go along w the Genki textbooks.
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nah, it was a mural celebrating the African American roots of the neighborhood on the side of the building they moved in to, not like inside their offices.
Is Duolingo Japanese available on the website yet? Or is it still app-only? That’s been my complaint. I’d rather do it on a big screen at home than on my phone
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I think it’s on the website I used it a long time ago when I was first getting started
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I also found Duolingo hard to use for Japanese. Now I use LingoDeer, which is much, much better.
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Same for me as most of the above: The lack of any explanations killed it.
I do plan to get back, at least slightly, once I’ve learned up to the level it “teaches” to use it as practice.
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For those who have used Duolingo for other languages, does the grammar level increase much as you go? I took the placement test for the Japanese course when it first came out and skipped most of the levels but I still find the content there to be incredibly basic.
I’ve completed two trees so far, but for european languages.
Even in their forums they’ll tell you that you don’t go any further than an A2 level, which is still “basic”
I don’t know how good you’re at japanese grammar right now, but if you’re N3 or above you won’t find duolingo useful imo.
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Ah good to know, thanks. I kinda had a feeling. Bothers me a bit when services claim to teach you languages and they only cover the basics but at least people can use it for practice.
One thing that just came to mind that I noticed with Duolingo, both when I tried the English test for Japanese speakers and vice versa, is that they seemed to translate tenses literally. This doesn’t really make much sense to me because English and Japanese tenses aren’t exactly 1:1 so it can make some phrases sound kinda odd. I don’t know how prevalent it is and maybe they’ve adjusted it since then, but I thought I’d mention it.
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Nobody here uses Rosetta Stone? I use it to study japanese and I’m really enjoying it! It’s quite different from other methods! It’s all based in pictures and logic (or you could say it’s based on context). No where in the course you’ll find any explanation! More, nothing is translated anywhere, the course never translates anything, rather it makes you learn by understanding by the context (the pictures) what the words and sentences mean.
It’s really different from everything I already tried to learn a new language. I think many people will dislike it for the total lack of explanations, but the concept of learning only by the context is really interesting and really well done. I admit that there were a couple of times that I was confused, but that made me research about what was troubling me and, in the process, I learned better because of the effort. It has 12 units with 4 lessons in each unit, I’m currently finishing unit 3. I think that problably the 12 units takes you to the knowledge of a N4 student.
Is it perfect? No, but I think it’s perfect for a begginer in grammar and vocabulary! It surely demands a companion for learning Kanji (as the majority of courses do, and that’s where WK enters the picture). My plan is to finish the 12 units of Rosetta and study Genki 1 and 2. I already read a couple of pages of Genki 1 and realized that Rosetta is a very good course indeed! But Genki will teach me properly the rules of grammar and other stuff. In the end of the day, Rosetta will make me like a child that learned a little of japanese only by context (how every child learn) and, when I get to Genki, it’ll be like going to school to learn the rules of something that I already know how to speak so-so.
Long text, sorry!
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i used rosetta stone in japanese for a little bit many years ago. it’s okay for if you don’t want to learn to read and write, otherwise, you’ll have to learn the syllabaries from an external source (i know it’s been said already but it bears repeating).
rs is also extremely repetitive - 女の子は走っています still haunts my dreams.
my opinion is that japanese language has too many nuanced aspects to it that rs can’t teach with pictures and it’s just too expensive to justify putting down the money for…* and this is more personal but i was the kind of child that really liked diagramming sentences in english class so for any language, i prefer seeing how anything fits in a given sentence. i can connect 走っています to the picture of someone running, but i don’t know why i’m saying it and how to apply it in other situations.
nb: i pirated it back then, lol
but i do wonder if finishing all 12 units could really get someone to n4 jplt
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I was disappointed with Duolingo because it was too basic. I tested out of every level and I feel like it only covers N5 grammar maybe a little N4. I wish there was an app that focused on more intermediate grammar. Maybe they will expand upon the content soon.
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