I got duolingo before I got into WK and still have a lot of that yearly subscription left. I think WK is way superior but I want to make the best out of the Duolingo experience. If it does one thing well is the nagging that I practise every day.
One of the biggest drawbacks for me is that it throws new words at me all the time without properly introducing them. The same with grammar, but I’m on top enough with grammar to get most of the things.
I think it would be much more pleasurable and educational if I could learn the words in e.g. Anki ahead so I could do the Duolingo more prepared and the listening comprehension would actually be an interesting challenge.
There is a deck I found which scraped the vocabulary from the Duolingo wiki but unfortunately it’s formatted really poorly (as in: no tags for which level we’re in, no kana just ローマ字).
I don’t think it needs much, just kanji with kana/furigana, a translation and a tag in which level it appears on Duolingo.
So I’m asking you, does this already exist? Does one of the programming wizards here have a script ready to do this easily? Should I just throw away my Duolingo win streak? ;D
You won’t believe it but I’m the one who made that deck a while back, when I still didn’t know how to continue with my Japanese learning. And shortly after that I luckily found WaniKani. Still, I didn’t think anyone used/found that Anki deck, wow! Thank you for your interest
So, my computer had an issue recently and it’s in repair rn but I still have the anki files and I think I could do that formatting for you. I’ll see if I can get my script back from when I made that deck then I’d have less to do but we’ll see!
There also was a Duolingo forum post, I think, were I linked to the script but sadly the Duolingo forums got taken down for whatever reason (those forums was the only thing keeping me from using it that long). My longest was a 100 day streak; I stopped the day I found WK haha
So, anyway I’ll write you a comment when I’m done with the deck.
Edit: confirmation image
Evidently, it really is my deck. And it has been downloaded more times than I would have thought
Oh, btw my second deck is almost exactly what you want as far as I can tell. That is the newer version of the one you found! (I made it on the same day on Jan 09 22 but still… I think it’s better)
I believe I remember the formatting being better when you export it into Anki. But this one has Kana, the translation from Duo and Google, as well as the Duolingo lesson name as the tag (e.g. “Ecology”, “Food”, …).
In my opinion compared to other resources out there I don’t feel it’s worth using Duolingo. I used Duolingo in the past and had the same problem you did with them introducing words out of no where and not really explaining the grammar. I would say overall LingoDeer is better and you get full grammar explanations. If you are looking for a free alternative to LingoDeer I would then suggest the app Japanese Grammar: Coban which is free.
If you like manga there is Crystal Hunters which is a manga that teaches Japanese. J-crosswords is app an that has kana and kanji puzzles N5-N1. There are Japanese language leaning video games Shujinkou and Nihongo Quest N5 in development right now.
In my opinion from what I have seen there are a million of things to use to learn Japanese that is way better than Duolingo.
True that. That’s why I stopped using Duolingo as well.
But in my opinion you have to find what works for you. Some people even find WaniKani to be too gamified and context-less but for me it’s perfect because those dopamine boosts help me keep my motivation up.
And, if Duolingo works for you it’s also fine as long as you don’t let it trick yourself into thinking it does more for your learning than it actually does. At the start I thought only doing Duolingo would let me get fluent but that’s just not the case. You need way more for that. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it if it’s fun for you as long as you use other resources for your studying as well.
But that’s just my two cents to Duolingo, just do what’s fun for you. And, if you really want to learn the Duolingo vocabulary with an Anki deck, do it
@RainbowBrite13: I know people on here have a mild opinion at best on Duolingo but as I outlined in the post, I’m still interested in it. Thanks for your input and alternative though
@saraqael: Ah, I think I saw your newer deck as well. I will check it out when I’m home and report back, thanks!
It’s hard for me to estimate how complicated that is with a script, but if it’s very easy, my ‘request’ would be whether it’s possible to parse the reading in a separate field. I learn new kanji only through WK, so my cards for words outside my WK schedule on Anki usually are either meaning → kanji+furigana or kanji+furigana → meaning, never kanji → meaning alone. Essentially how the Genki routine in my class works. If that way of parsing is possible, I’d be very grateful but if it’s too much of a hassle, it might not be worth it because it’s only me (and a few people downloading it from AnkiWeb).
I’ve had frustrations with Duolingo in the past. I’m a paying subscriber at the moment…but definitely sort of stopped using it recently. One of my main gripes is audio/pronunciation…it’s awful. I will say I’ve picked up quite a few nuggets from Duo that I don’t think I would have found organically through my (current level) reading material, WaniKani, or Bunpro…so there’s some value there for me. But overall, I find Duo to be more of pain, and less of a fruitful learning ecosystem that I first thought it was when beginning it.
I made the cards be like this: Characters (with Furigana) → Meaning. Sorry, but the furigana also contains the kana because it’s just the reading of the word not only the reading of the Kanji in it but it shouldn’t be that much of a problem because most items are either only Kanji or only Kana.
I hope this is what you wanted! If not please tell me. Changing something is now really easy because I have the script ready to run!
(I kept the Google translation as you can see, tell me if I should remove it.)
What is front and what is back as well as the learning intervals I think you can change that yourself, right? I haven’t used Anki that much so I don’t really know how you can change those settings.
