Personally, I don’t use Duolingo anymore, but I’m glad I found it in the first place. Since I think I would never have started learning Japanese otherwise. The game-ified aspect even though I don’t consider it very good for learning now, when I started it helped me a lot not to give up after a few days or weeks (and I kept this mindset). But I reached a point where I felt like I was stuck and going in circles… So if I had to give an advice to someone who wants to start but is struggling to get started, I would recommend him to begin with Duolingo and then after 2-3 months and when he will be confident about hirigana and katakana to switch definitively on other resources.
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Used to do Duolingo far more often before, but yeah I found the grammar explanations a bit inadequate. It has improved its content over the years though, and I still find it a polished experience that I find myself going back to for vocabulary and sentence practice (I also found recently that they added in the Stories function for the Japanese course)
So currently, my study regimen for Japanese:
WK, podcasts (e.g., JapanesePod101.com), and occasional practice with Duolingo
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It was pretty useful for learning kana, but beyond that I don’t think it was all that… It introduces grammatical concepts really early, and does a poor job of explaining them (は vs が confusion, for example, and doesn’t explain anywhere that there are kun’yomi and on’yomi readings of kanji, which leads to all sorts of questions about why two phrases have the same character sounding completely different). I think Duo is fine as a supplementary resource/study material, but it is toted as being the new-age Rosetta Stone (in that it’s the go-to language app), when I frankly think LingoDeer does Japanese a lot better (as it is much more focused on teaching vocabulary, but still has the issue of teaching grammar concepts too early). I kind of have an axe to grind with both apps, since I’m convinced those style of apps (and maybe just phone apps in general) aren’t really optimal ways to study languages (at least for me, if it works for you, fantastic, go nuts). My Duo Plus subscription runs out this month, and I’m not paying for another year. I have a lifetime LingoDeer sub, so maybe I’ll revisit that at some point, but again I just feel as if my time is being wasted on those apps and I end up fooling myself into thinking I understand learned concepts more than I actually do when using them.
Dunno, I guess those apps are overall fine, but I’d recommend just buying a Genki textbook instead of paying for a premium subscription though, if you’re looking for another study resource. I stand by the statement that WK + a textbook is the optimal self-study method for beginners, and it kind of sucks that there are probably tons of people who use Duo (or -like apps) as their introduction to the language, and end up getting confused/frustrated, and quitting.
tldr; not a fan, but it’s useful for specific things. I feel as if it makes you feel accomplishment without actually learning, and is a poor overall introduction to language-learning for that reason.
–I should mention, Duo apparently updated their Japanese language course a bunch since I last used it, I have no idea if it’s improved or not. Seems like they brought it closer to their other course’s overall level of features (for example, adding Stories), but I’m still not convinced. I wanted to make a note, since I remembered that they had sent out an email talking about how they updated the course not too long ago. Again, go nuts, give it a shot and see if it seems useful to you, but it wasn’t really for me when I was working through it a couple years ago.–
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Legendary is definitely on Android too
t. android user
It’s the same for me, I got started with duolingo, but by the time I reached 1st checkpoint it felt very lacking, so I moved on to the more conventional books and methods to learn Japanese, but I still make it a point to visit it once every day, it does sometimes help when it throws in the occasional vocab that I haven’t encountered yet, but overall it’s a terrible app to actually learn a language, in fact I feel like it can do more harm than good if one focuses on it, since it leaves huge gaps in your knowledge. You encounter grammar points and Kanji out of nowhere without any explanation. It can really confuse those people who went too deep into duolingo and then started to really start learning the language by studying.
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Textbook is harder to motivate for though imo. Most people would have to use a textbook at home in their spare time too. I do Japanese at work, so it is just easier to do it on computer or phone.
Anyway the key is doing a little bit every day. And even if you use “inferior” products every day you will
eventually get good.
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Of course, I wasn’t trying to imply that using the apps is inherently bad, but for me they sort of became time-wasters where I convinced myself I was learning much more than I was, simply based on the fact that I was spending time.
Everyone learns in different ways, and I don’t want to devalue things that help others, just because I had different experiences from them…
That being said though, when talking about “study materials” or “methods” I’m not really talking about messing around on apps at work, I’m talking about taking time to work on studying specifically… and doing that is, without argument going to give better results (we shouldn’t even be comparing the two things really).
Oh I don’t “mess around” at work. I am always doing something Japanese all day at work (I work security and there is a lot of downtime).
Dude when I say “screw around at work” I was referring to myself. (hence the bolded “for me”)… no need to get so defensive, I’m not trying to start anything.
I have a similar impression after using it for a couple of days, but it does have a problem with consistency, some of the sentence examples are quite strange and not something one uses on a daily basis, and any feedback provided by users directly to the question dies down shortly after the question is added and is never addressed 
.
On the upside, actual Japanese native speakers provide feedback so one can learn quite a lot from the responses to questions.
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The bolded “for me” is two paragraphs up though. I did not know that it applied for your entire post.
I’m not being defensive btw I was just a little confused whether that last paragraph applied to me but all good.
I’m about halfway through unit 3 of Duolingo’s Japanese course, after a year and a few months. I picked up a book on Japanese after 2-3 months of Duolingo’s “we explain nothing” approach, which was helpful, and picked up WK after about 8 months, which has been excellent. WK and Duolingo are now dovetailing in ways that are very reinforcing (e.g. DL taught me the word for “hospital”, as part of a section on how to handle being sick, then right after that WK taught me “sickness” and “institution” and I could feel smart about putting them together…). I appreciate the grammar that DL manages to weave in, so that you learn how things should sound and how the various formations go. It helped with learning the difference between tanoshimi and tanoshimu, for example, that DL shows tanoshimi always is followed by ni, to look forward to. WK of course doesn’t give much context, or even how the verbs/adjectives look in various conjugated forms, though it gets you through vocabulary very efficiently.
But with the goof-ups in the recent voice additions in DL, I would have been lost without already having been taught the on’yomi and kun’yomi differences from WK. Whether I could have handled that a year ago as a complete beginner, I don’t know.
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For me Duolingo was a nice start and made Japanese feel “doable.” I also liked it better than Rosetta. Rosetta had nice recordings of native speakers, but didn’t really explain anything to you. You had to figure things out yourself.
However, for Duolingo, I eventually found it to be a slow grind and it just wasn’t giving me what I needed. Certainly, if you’ve got time to spare (and don’t want to give up you streak lol) and are using it for the vocabulary then it’s probably harmless other than leaching from your Japanese learning time.
I have to say, as far as Japanese language programs/apps, I’ve really enjoyed Human Japanese (beginner and intermediate) and the additional supplements for it on Satori Reader. HJ has great explanations for grammar points. And it’s pretty cheap.
Happy New Year!
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Human Japanese is pretty awesome. I am still on the first one but I can see my reading is improving.
The grammar explanations are fantastic!
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I think that is actually on purpose.
Have you noticed that, except for the quite tiny “tips”, there isn’t any “descriptive teaching”?
Those “match the image” exercises is how vocabulary is actually the exposed. Not only for the correct answer, but you also get information on other words that will allow you to get the right answer on other questions.
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I haven’t noticed, but the repetition with matching, as long as it’s not too obvious, is actually helpful 
To put it simply, time spent on duolingo could be better spent in graded immersion.
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Shockingly, I’ve found it useful to a certain degree but much later on from being a beginner. After knowing all the kanji I know now and all the basic mechanics of how the Japanese language works now, Duolingo helps give me sentences that reinforce the rules I know of the language with a decent variety of sentences. I’d say it seems more useful once you know a good amount of Japanese than earlier on. That being said, I wouldn’t doubt that there’s better resources at my point but it was a nice reinforcement tool.
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Duolingo is fine. It doesn’t teach you Japanese, but it’s a fun way to practice reading and constructing sentences and using written vocabulary. It’s not so great for learning Kanji. Use WaniKani for that. And it’s not so good for explaining grammar. I’m using the Genki textbooks for that. But it’s fun practice you can do every day. Practice definitely helps build reading fluency over time.
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Came up with this weird idea to do Duolingo English course in Japanese. Will post back with results.
@yamitenshi at first glance this looks far more helpful than doing the JP course in English 
I like where this is going:
… and fail. Apparently my English is so bad that I have to start from level 1 after doing the placement test 
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