Yeah, it’s faster to use the web app, and you can use something like Yomichan to hover over and look up Kanji. Still, it often says you’re wrong because you used a different word order (it doesn’t catch all of them). Also, there’s still no way to get a list of vocab/grammar. And if you’re on a PC, there are way better apps like BunPro anyways.
I tried DL again recently, it was alright, but i found even more reasons to dislike it.
Duolingo uses a popular language-learning approach that I personally despise, which is to teach you by repeating specific phrases. It does slowly add in concepts like different verb tenses, conjugating adjectives, how to compare items, that sort of thing, but this is always in the format of repeating a set example, so it’s hard to extrapolate those concepts to build new sentences.
The forums are an absolute necessity–on most lessons, there are comments spelling out all the kanji with kana, and whenever they introduce a new grammar point without explanation, there’s usually someone explaining what just happened in the new sentence. I’d love to know where these commenters are actually getting their language knowledge from.
It is free and fun, which may be worth more depending on how serious you are about learning a language. It definitely isn’t ideal, especially for Japanese (Duolingo seems to do better with European languages, and as stated, I’m not a fan of “learn this language by repeating these stock sentences”). They’ve made significant improvements recently (adding more kanji, more tips, and dramatically expanding the language tree), and it’s kind of a continuous work in progress.
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I personally don’t like duo lingo for Japanese because there are some mistakes/unnatural Japanese and all they don’t use kanji when they can, for example you learn the kanji for 3 but instead of 三 they will still use さん so its also a bit confusing, i think lingodeer is the best language learning app but you have to use 100% of it some people just rush through without reading the gramma explanation and not revise stuff also i would recommend doing the „stories“ so you can practice pronunciation and compare with others
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Personally, I don’t find duolingo worth the time. You don’t learn much, and it doesn’t explain anything. There are other resources that are better. I highly recommend LingoDeer. It has two Japanese courses, and the first is free. It’s kind of like a mini textbook in app form, so it covers grammar, the different forms, vocab, listening, and speaking. It also does a good job at explaining what you’re learning in each lesson. It’s a good rounded learning resource, especially if you don’t have a textbook like Genki or Minna no Nihongo.
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it actually has explanations for each lessons (light bulb icon). But they’re not well integrated. And other than that i agree, there are better uses of time than DL.
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