so my real question is, is duolingo a waste of time when you are using wanikani. I judt don’t feel I’m learning much fromit and also duo’s style seems to be in conflict with wani’s in that duo seems to teach you like japanese kids are taught with overwhelming continuous repetition.
My biggest concern with Duolingo is that a few years ago they got rid of human curators and now everything is just AI-generated content.
Duolingo has always been so-so for Japanese, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a waste of time; it wasn’t good at teaching, but it was decent for getting a few practice sentences each day.
That being said, over recent years, the free experience has gotten to be quite miserable, and if you’re going to pay for a service, I think LingoDeer is a far superior option for Japanese; it’s actually built for teaching East Asian languages, which means less jank, and it has good grammar explanations.
Also, as Leebo mentions, they’ve gone all-in on AI recently.
I bought duolingo a few months ago and they actually had very good regional pricing for me but am currently not finding it very useful.
You are probably going to get a lot of negative opinions about Duolingo. Upon finishing the available material last year, I posted my thoughts in my study log.
TLDR:
- If you are treating Duolingo like a game, you are doing it wrong.
- Unless you are using Duo for Schools, you will have to do most of the teaching. I treated it like an immersive experience where no one was going to stop the conversation to explain or correct my grammar/vocabulary.
- Duolingo has a spaced REPETITION system that is in fact repetitive. Recent changes have made the advanced levels less so.
- The desktop version bypasses the limitations of the app for users who do not want to pay for Duolingo.
BTW: wanikani is not the standard for teaching Japanese. Comparing other resources to it will lead you to dissaapointment.
In the end, if a resource does not work for you, try others or create your own frankenstein style.