This checks out with the vast majority of comments I read on Japanese on Duolingo. Like Sharon, you’re level 20 in French and 25 in Spanish, why can’t you accept that languages have different grammars?
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Wait what? Next you’re going to tell me you can’t translate words and sentence one to one 
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Ah, I see the problem here.
Nothing against Duolingo, I did the Italian and Swedish trees, but the Japanese one… woof.
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I would have expected a little more flexibility from some of the European learners, but I suppose people are easily shocked across the board.
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They changed the course, so it’s a lot better. It’s good free translation practice at least when you don’t want to pay the annual subscription again to WK or BunPro
Is that true? Hmm, I tried it as recently as last month and didn’t notice any difference. I guess I’ll check again. I’m happy they added translation practice, because they only had that for a handful of languages before. I’d still rate Lingodeer over Duolingo. Yes, Duolingo is free (ad supported) but I find that gets really old, really fast, and the monthly fee is more than LingoDeer.
Everybody’s always so quick to jump on the Duo hate train 
but what specifically is oof about the Japanese course? As a primary learning source it’s no good, but I would expect that of any language “app” like that. You’re going to need specific vocab and grammar resources, and I guess I never expected getting those topics in depth from Duo. I knew from the start I would need to do my own learning. IMO it’s good quick practice for days when I’m too lazy to read native content or readers or whatever and some of the people in the community are quite helpful.
Now of course I understand that like any tool, it doesn’t work for everyone. But it really does just seem like a meme to hate on Duolingo.
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I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not a shill for LingoDeer, hehe, this is just my experience as somebody who has used both platforms extensively.
Historically it’s been very poorly regarded for a number of reasons, not least machine generated audio and a very much “teach you stuff and not explain any of it” in a way that works for Latin languages, but not so much for Asian languages. They may well have made improvements to the course over over the years, I’ve not bothered to try progressing the tree, if I’m entirely honest, but it still starts off pretty poorly in my opinion by trying to do the same thing they do in every other language tree. They mix learning kana up with greetings, seasons, colours, etc. which is pretty weird. In that way, I’d rate it up there with Rosetta Stone.
I genuinely have nothing against Duolingo, I’ve had a plus sub for a while, and I used it for completing the Swedish tree which I enjoyed very much. However, the system was built from the ground up for languages that just have to deal with different words, not two syllabary sets and kanji. For Swedish, I didn’t need external grammar or vocab resources, for example.
The reason a lot of people recommend LingoDeer instead is that it was built from the ground up for Asian languages, features native speakers and has fairly extensive grammatical explanations at the start of each lesson. It has, in my opinion at least, a much better internal review system, allowing you to select sets of review items like you would with an Anki deck. It’s not SRS, but it’s perfectly fine for reviewing as and when you have time.
The course on LingoDeer also makes it clear how it equates to testing levels, the Japanese 1 course mapping to N5 content (so roughly Genki I) and the Japanese 2 course mapping to N5 (roughly Genki II). This is the range of material available, for example:
In my opinion the grammar is far better explained, in a more logical and textbook fashion, meaning that you don’t actually have to rely as much on external sources. Though obviously it’s better used with other material, it does technically cover N5 and N4 material, so you could (though might find it hard) use it as a comprehensive study resource. I personally find that with it, paired with BunPro and WK, I’ve got a reasonably rounded beginner level Japanese experience.
Here is an example of a LingoDeer lesson page vs DuoLingo:
I tried to find lessons that matched, more or less, though one is dealing with language and the otherwith nationality
Edit: I forgot to add, Duo also doesn’t seem to offer any kind of customisation, whereas LingoDeer will let you choose to display vocab as; Kanji, Hiragana, Romaji, Kanji + Hiragana, Kanji+ Romaji, Hiragana + Romaji, Kanji + Hiragama + Romaji.
They also let you choose either the Hepburn or Kunrei-sheik romaji system.
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Nice one! The puppy ramen thing was hilarious 
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+1 on the machine generated voices being… suboptimal. They recently redid them but it didn’t fix any of the pronunciation issues… The only other main complaint I have with Duo is that their list of “acceptable” sentences seems to be manually inputted by staff and very incomplete in some cases. A WK-esque user synonym system would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t really understand what’s wrong with learning a few simple words/greetings mixed in with the kana, or why kana and kanji don’t work with the system. Maybe again I just had different expectations.
The tips I’ve basically skipped. I started reading Tae Kim pretty early so I didn’t really get a lot of value out of Duo’s tips.
I haven’t done any other courses on it, but I looked over my friend’s shoulder when he was doing a German lesson and it looks… the same? I’m not exactly sure what would be different for a Japanese course.
I guess my point is that Duo has been acceptable for me.
I tried LingoDeer a little bit, not enough to look at the tips, those look fine. It seemed basically the same as Duo to me. The thing that really rubbed me the wrong way though was the listening exercises. Transcribing the sentence kana by kana? My brain parses whole words when listening not indiviudal kana, so Duo’s word based input was far smoother for me. And using the manual input in Deer would get angry if I used kanji. Honestly I don’t know if I could rely on Lingodeer as my sole resource.
Okay enough thread derailing. I’m sure we could go back and forth for hours, but I’ll concede the point that Lingodeer works better for most people.
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The only thing I find unfair with your critique is that you’re exclusively comparing it with paid resources. I’d honestly love to see a good review of someone comparing it with another free resource (maybe something like Speechling).
It’s possible that I’ve been too much of a masochist by reading Duolingo comments, but the sheer amount of beginners who insist that Japanese (or any target language grammar) must be the exact same as their native language is scary.
Given how Duo’s course contributors are chosen, they really should switch to native speakers. I’m not sure why they pay Amazon for their computer voices over the sheer amount of native volunteers.
As OP I give my blessing to continuing derailing with critiques of Duolingo, LingoDeer, and other comparative resources.
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The tricky thing is that Duo is mostly freemium. Yes, you can use it for free, but you can then only make five mistakes on lessons, after which time you must do additional practices to be able to complete any more lessons, on top of which you get a lot of ads. To be able to do lessons at your leisure, the monthly cost for their Plus plan is £12.49. LingoDeer’s single language monthly cost is £10.99 or £12.99.
Duolingo doesn’t have any lifetime plans, but at least once a year you can get lifetime access to LingoDeer for something like £60 (I paid £30 a couple years back) which is the equivalent of 5 months of Duolingo Plus, for a lifetime of what is at least as good as, if not better than Duolingo for Japanese.
So yes, you can technically say that you’re comparing a free vs paid product, but consider the free vs the paid experience you get for that.
It’s not though… That’s only on the app. If you use a browser or the website, you don’t have those restrictions.
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I’m not comparing them as web based learning platforms though; I’m straight up comparing them as app based learning. I perhaps could have made it clearer, but given I used app screenshots, I felt it was fairly implicit.
Most of Duolingo’s revenue stream comes from the app, so that’s where most of their development goes.
Duolingo was always web-first with a subpar app (though lately they’ve been dumbing down/crippling the website to match the app), while Lingodeer’s website is so bad it may as well not exist, making Lingodeer is defacto mobile-only.
I guess comparing websites wouldn’t be a fair contest, except in the other direction. Personally, I prefer websites to mobile apps. I can’t stand using a mobile keyboard.
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No, I get that - I’ve been using Duolingo since January 2013 and have done five languages on it, to various levels of completion.
I think you hit the nail on head with Duolingo crippling the website. I remember when Duolingo went freemium on the app, and the prediction then was largely that they’d roll out the same restrictions to the web and it looks largely like they’ll do that. This is part of the issue, I think, that their revenue stream is so tied to ads and Plus now that they pretty much have to make the same mechanics feature on the website in the future.
Whereas LingoDeer is likely to improve their web experience. I can’t say I really use it, but I just checked it and I would argue that it’s just as usable as Duolingo.
As I say, I’ve got no horse in the race, I’ve currently got a Plus sub on Duo, so clearly don’t hate it, just objectively feel it’s a poor fit for any Asian language.
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The Lingodeer website is just a lazy port of the mobile UI, with all the tap-centricness that implies. In Duolingo, you used to be able to do the entire review process using just your keyboard, and you mostly still can use your keyboard for everything. On the Lingodeer website, you have to click on everything. You can’t, say advance to the next question using the keyboard. Of course, only 1 in 10 questions on Lingodeer even allow you to use the keyboard at all and only then on forbearance, but it does mean that if you were able to use the keyboard to answer questions on Lingodeer, you’d have to constantly switch between the keyboard and mouse, making it more trouble than it’s worth. It also makes terrible use of horizontal space like most mobile UIs, but to be fair, Duolingo does that too.
Apart from that, there are much more glaring issues with Lingodeer’s website. For example, it’s missing major functionality, like the entire review section (bad as it is in the app, there at least is a review option of some sort in the app.)
Most damingly though is that Lingodeer’s website is literally broken and unusable. I started on the website but quickly ran into a bug which wouldn’t let me advance past lesson 7 no matter what I did. I had to switch to the app to even continue at all (which also had the side effect of making me realize just how bad the website was compared to the app anyway.)
I don’t know why they even have the website, except for the sake of claiming that they support web.
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I’ve said these things before, so I’ll try (probably unsuccessfully) to be brief: Duolingo, as much as it’s probably the best 100% pay-only-if-you-want resource (I can’t think of anything that free users can’t access. Please correct me if I’m wrong.), has a tendency to make me really angry when I use it. It generally makes me feel like my time is being wasted. There are two major reasons for this, and they’re related to Duolingo being 100% translation-based:
- There’s a very limited number of ‘correct’ translations.
- Duolingo translations are often unnatural or incorrect.
#2 might be more of an impression based on past errors that have now been fixed, but I was so angry when it taught “aider avec” as the ‘correct’ French translation of ‘to help with’ in the sense of ‘to help (someone) deal with (something) causing them difficulty’. In French, “avec”=‘with’ is used to express the idea of accompaniment or the means used to accomplish something. It can’t be used that way. I can’t say for certain that similar sentences exist in their Japanese modules (beyond the time they insisted on the use of 続き具合 to translate ‘the flow of a text’, which admittedly isn’t wrong), but basically, Duolingo is constructed as a cheap translation tutorial that teaches learners that there’s a one-to-one translation for everything, which is of course completely false. Earlier in this thread, someone (I forgot who. Sorry.) said that we’re expecting too much out of Duolingo as an app (or web-based learning resource). My response to that is that since its inception, Duolingo has been marketing itself as a good alternative to college language courses. In other words, it claims to be just as good as – if not better than – those courses, and markets itself as a complete course, at least as far as reading and writing go. To me, it’s so ridiculously wrong for a course to market itself as ‘teaching languages’ from scratch when it’s so sorely lacking in grammatical explanation and the differentiation of nuances. Thus, I agree that we shouldn’t perhaps be expecting that much out of Duolingo, but the reason we even have such expectations is because of Duolingo’s claims.
Side note on some other issues:
- The last time I tested their voice recognition system (in 2014-2015), I hummed a French sentence using the correct rhythm without saying a word, and I got marked correct.
- It’s ridiculously hard to give general feedback that isn’t directly related to the translations. I had no idea how to contact the Japanese course team specifically in order to report an error in the lesson on the correct kanji for each of the various meanings of はかる. You can report errors in translations without any issues, but the lessons are oh-so-sacred.
Overall, what I feel is this: because Duolingo has a tendency to isolate vocabulary words in their respective lessons, even when it comes to European languages, it’s really only any good for memorising ‘language facts’ in isolated contexts, and it doesn’t allow learners to get an intuitive feel for the language or how to use it. Pronouns or the lack thereof included, by the way, because I find that Duolingo Japanese translations tend to include pronouns in the Japanese by default, even though most Japanese speakers would probably drop those pronouns in context. As for the forums, as helpful as some people are on them, they’re a far cry from something like WK forums or WordReference. I tend to feel as though discussions on Japanese are just the blind leading the blind, because almost no one is able to quote authoritative resources. It’s just this echo chamber of people who are talking to each other while mainly referring to knowledge given to them by Duolingo, and I think the main reason for that is that anyone who has advanced sufficiently to easily use authoritative resources rapidly feels the urge to abandon Duolingo. (PS: while I know this is meaningless as a measure of my Japanese proficiency, I tested out of all the levels on the skill tree using the milestone tests, after taking a few tries to memorise the translations they wanted, so I have some idea of what the course offers as a whole.)
In summary, if I hate Duolingo, it’s because at some point, it stopped being fun because I started to realise I wasn’t learning how I ought to express myself in the languages I wanted to learn. It wasn’t helping me to speak naturally, and that’s when it lost its value for me, since I could just as easily learn vocabulary and grammar through other, more interesting means that would help me retain knowledge better.
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I’m absolutely positive that the definite article has nothing to do with it.
It’s the vast ambiguity of the Asian languages that causes trouble for the translation machine learning. It’s very difficult to understand standalone Japanese sentences.
Similarly to Japanese, Slavic languages have an optional subject in a ton of situations, but they’re not nearly as ambiguous because it’s usually at least clear what the relation between the subject and the speaker is. There isn’t a concept of an (in)definite article in Slavic languages either. You’d just use a pronoun to explicitly say you’re talking about this or that rather than about something in general.
The lack of spaces, the optionality of particles, every word having countless meanings, all of this contributes to the inaccurate translations. Even humans often struggle with translating Japanese without sufficient context. (Source: any VTuber translation released shortly after the livestream = without enough time to figure out the exact context of everything that has been said).
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I’ve only tried Duolingo and Lingodeer briefly, and I think this is a reasonable summary of how I felt about both. Everything seemed so disjointed and the pacing was really awkward.
Honestly I think some combination of Tae-Kim/Cure Dolly/Japanese Ammo + Anki (+ Tangoristo, RIP 
) is as good as it gets as far as free resources go, and is a better combination than any language class I’ve ever taken.
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