Is Duolingo good for later use?

Japanese Language Questions
16

I also think DuoLingo is pretty bad. It’s an alright time sink in the tram when you already know a lot of Japanese from elsewhere.
I did Japanese on DuoLingo for a long time (completed all courses at the time, which is now level 3), stopped when i started WK and Bunpro, recently tried a few lessons again, and was even more convinced it’s bad.

Some problems with DuoLingo:

  • It throws random kanji at you without translation or furigana.
    (sometimes there are ways around that, but not always)
  • Because it doesn’t have SRS, you often don’t see a word for a long time or ever after you encountered it, so it’s not good for memorizing anything. You can’t even get a list of vocab, lesson-wise or otherwise. This is the biggest flaw of all in my opinion. Not to mention a structured search for grammar.
  • The answering method is cumbersome: It often just takes too long to answer. You can’t rearrange words you already selected, so if you make a mistake you have to delete all words you added afterwards, and even without mistakes it takes a while to find all the words in the correct order, because it’s not immediately clear what the sentence’s structure will be. You have to do a lot of busy work filling all the words in, a fill-out sentence (like in Bunpro) would usually be sufficient.
  • The lessons before each level are alright, but it’s not encouraged enough to do them before taking the level. Many people don’t even know that DuoLingo has text lessons where it teaches some grammar etc. before you’re supposed to start the level.
  • The course stopped pretty quickly for me. It seems like they added new levels and lessons now (i completed level 3, now there’s 4-6), but it stops at a not very advanced level.
  • It has some nonsense sentences like わたしのいぬはぼうしをうります (My dog sells hats.). This actually helped me memorize the word for hat, but a sentence like “It’s not 6 o’clock right now” definitely isn’t helpful.

One thing DuoLingo is alright for is listening practice. But that’s not even ideal for DuoLingo’s best use case, which is using some time during public transport. And there I prefer WK and Bunpro anyways.

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