I googled around. The Duolingo Japanese Tree 4.0 had around 130 lessons, 1,300 kanji, and 3,000 vocabulary. This new 5.0 Tree has around 170 lessons, and probably another 400 kanji and more vocabulary. I think it covers most of what is on the JLPT N3 test, maybe some of N2. But as others have said, it’s not really a great teaching tool. It is, in my opinion, a decent way to practice, as it gives you many thousands of practice sentences to work with.
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I think it’s fine - somewhat fun. But if they told their users that it should not be thought of as a complete path to fluency in and of itself, then that would be good. And many common people who don’t know anything about language learning and what is really required to learn a language get into it and think they’re making more progress than they really are. Optimally, you would use Duolingo in conjunction with an array of other resources, it would be one activity of many. But they won’t say honestly that their users should get into other resources because it would be bad for business. So this is bad.
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My opinion of Duolingo has changed since my last post.
Duolingo is not an app to learn japanese (I still think this) it has vague or missing explanations, also they introduce new grammar randomly without previous explanation and without making sense. And maybe you write something and duolingo says that is wrong because is not what he expects you to write although is correct, and there is no feedback about why is wrong what you have just wrote.
But, for what is good duolingo then? For practicing, it forces you to write sentences in japanese, it is the only app I have found that allows me to write something and tell me if what I wrote is good. And that is worth a lot, it helps to maintain my japanese knowledge fresh.
I recommend duolingo to practice, not to learn japanese. To learn there are a lot of apps
Vocabulary: Wanikani
Grammar: Bunpro, Migii JLPT
Writing Kanjis / caligraphy : Kanji Study, Kanji!, Kanji recognizer
Listening: Migii JLPT , Lingodeer+, Satorireader
Reading: Satorireader
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So …it seems Duolingo has dropped/sunsetted their entire community forum … I cant help but think it’s mostly due to the number of topics/posts related to people complaining about the new characters/voices they created …
Not sure about anyone here but I don’t want to learn Japanese pronunciation from a whole lot of non Japanese people/non-native speakers pronouncing words in their own default accents (Italian, Indian etc) …also the new characters often get the kanji reading wrong which so many people complained about on the forum which I guess annoyed the producers of the app.
So the takeaway is; be careful if you are new to Japanese because the pronunciation/accent is often not native and the kanji readings are quite often wrong on Duolingo.
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Duolingo is garbage. I used it for a couple of months but quickly worked that out.
Yuta just did a youtube video on it actually. Give it a watch if you’re contemplating Duolingo.
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I don’t know what y’all are on about. Just tried LingoDeer and I gotta say it’s at least 10 times more frustrating than Duolingo in terms of what answers it’ll accept, especially considering there isn’t even a way to report your answers as correct for them to be added to the database.
Edit: just tested out of the 3 first stages and my impressions so far:
- Absolutely no flexibility in terms of sentence order, which is the whole point of using particles in Japanese.
- Unnatural sounding sentences and forcing you to use subjects in situations where it’d be perfectly fine to drop them.
- They don’t specify that they want you to use a polite register but will mark it wrong when you use ではない or じゃない instead of ではありません.
- Inconsistent use of kanji. Got 違います marked wrong because I dindn’t spell it in hiragana.
- No understanding of combined particles like 部屋には.
- I could go on.
This is what ya’ll are claiming is better than Duolingo? Duolingo at least has a report button and an ever-increasing answers databased that gets updated semi-regularly.
P.S. got another answer wrong for writing パソコン instead of ぱそこん and 八万五千円 instead of はちまんごせんえん. Istg, this app is the pits.
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Maybe ok for complete begginers but I think Duolingo’s method is not a very efficient approach 
I’ve tried Duolingo and Rossetta Stone with really poor results (It was with french though 
). Nevertheless in my opinion, almost nothing compares with some textbook plus immersion (repeated high quality input).
The main forums I can live without, but it is a shame the individual lesson discussions will not be updated, although at least they are preserved in aspic right now. I found them really helpful, especially in the early stages where there were some really generous contributors. Presumably the forthcoming big overhaul will lose all that content for good.
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I’ve been using Duolingo for just over 500 days consecutively and I use it as part of my Daily Routine. Personally it helps with Grammar and forming sentence structures, but I wouldn’t use it as my only form of Japanese learning
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I did it years ago, when it was still in development. I think it works like grammar exercise book. Main problem with duolingo, is that people end up typing the wrong language and learning wrong grammar. So for nonnative duolingo sucks even more, but then again you learn to correct your English too at the same time.
One option is to take the learn English course in Japanese. That way you get to type more Japanese. You most likely wont understand many of the instructions tho, but most things are easy to figure out. I didn’t complete that course tho.
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I think the complaint about the new voices was a very general one, but it’s just that Japanese and a couple of other languages like Italian and French (in reference to which I read most of the complaints) depend a lot on proper pronunciation so the new “funny” voices were nothing but grating. For a while I did the reverse Japanese tree (Japanese → English) and there even the English pronunciation sounded like someone who writes Craigslist scam offers - completely unnatural 
.
To me it’s really baffling, because it’s a feature no one asked for, no one was happy with during the initial testing stage (for a couple of the first languages where it was implemented) and yet Duolingo still decided to roll it out. 
I quit using Duolingo, because the number of translations that would not be accepted or the overall inconsistency with being overly literal in some exercises, but not at all in others, was simply too much.
I tried this for a while and indeed one uses a little more Japanese in general, but the core issue with Duolingo was still there sadly 
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I haven’t used Duolingo in a long time… What in the world? They really have Italian people reading Japanese phrases?
It’s not specifically Italian people as the words and phrases are “read” by text-to-speech programs, but Duolingo replaced the default male/female Japanese synthetic voices with a whole range of more culturally-varied characters. Here’s the original article: Giving our characters voices
I don’t know which text-to-speech programs were used before, but in some of the questions you can still hear the original voices and I think they’re way more accurate. I’m personally using Google Assistant in Japanese quite a bit and even though it’s also text-to-speech, the male voice is extremely well-done.
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i started more formally learning japanese with duolingo in october or so? and while i don’t think ive made a LOT of progress i think it was definitely useful in formalizing some of the stuff ive picked up from a decade+ of consuming japanese media. i pick up language pretty easily i suppose, and i think duolingo’s approach to teaching works okay for me.
by no means is it perfect, but i think for getting started on studying it’s pretty good. and they don’t claim to make you fluent - they say a beginner to intermediate level, from which you can find more resources - which is primarily what i’m using it for. for practicing grammar and vocab every day, for giving me a little endorphin reward to study, etc, it works for what i need it to.
my main complaint is a lack of focus on kanji/vocab explanations, which is primarily why im here as well i’m still a beginner, and i think that is who duolingo is meant to be for - beginners, who want to get started in a language but dont know where to look. they make getting started on learning way more accessible to the average person.
all of yalls issues with them are valid - but i think a lot of yall are coming from an intermediate to advanced level, so the basic repetition, simplified knowledge, transliteration, etc that they use doesn’t work well for you. i’m at that level in french, and the french course is super frustrating and not helpful for me. i much prefer self study by consuming french media, reading/listening to french news, etc. or finding specific resources to work on specific questions. and once i get more advanced in japanese ill shift more to that kind of focus and move away from duolingo.
overall i think yes duolingo has a lot of problems and they aren’t always right, but their approach has improved over time and they try to be accessible to beginner learners - also they’re free! which a lot of other services are not - looking at LingoDeer here for example, or purchasing textbooks. i’ll give them credit for those things, and for keeping me practicing and studying japanese when otherwise i probably would have given up. monkey brain loves praise and little shinies hehe. duolingo has its issues but for now the usefulness outweighs those for me.
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That’s how they got me, too! 
Even in the units that were killing me, it felt so good to get through it and get the little celebration…
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It has its good and bad points. The course as a whole covers about the same amount of vocab as WK, and gets up to N3 grammar, so it’s possible to learn a lot from it. Learning vocab is hit or miss though, since there’s no SRS optimizing when you see something again, and also it starts off doing easy things like multiple choice or matching, and only when you’re getting closer to burning a topic (to put it in WK terms) do you really need to understand the word with no cues.
Grammar also has its good and bad points. Only the grammar points for the first half of the course have any explanation at all, and those are not particularly good explanations (Human Japanese / Satori Reader is my favorite for grammar explanations). However, the exercises do a good job of building familiarity with grammar points through repetition. And despite what a recent comment said, double particles come up a LOT in the bottom couple of sections, so this practice in which particles can combo together and when to use them is pretty valuable.
I like that there is flexibility in how you use Duolingo. Do you keep going over a lesson until you master it, or cover a breadth of material, then see how well you remember it when you come back to that lesson? When presented with a Japanese sentence, do you use your ears first, getting good listening practice, or focus on reading the text? Do you use the word bank, type answers in Japanese, or use speech-to-text to enter answers and get some speaking practice?
Duolingo does have some issues. User comments on each problem are great, but all locked right now. The new characters and their voices are annoying, and Duolingo badly needs a way to turn them off. The later lessons get into intermediate material, but are less proofread, as few people get that far. You’ll occasionally find unnatural sentences, or wrong text-to-speech readings, and as I said, there are zero grammar explanations by that point.
If you don’t mind a few ads, it’s one of the better resources available free of charge, but best suited for either casual language learners or as one tool to use alongside others.
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I agree with this. It must be incredibly difficult to learn Japanese from scratch with just Duolingo. I am trying with their Korean course and it’s just too hard because of their hearts system, it’s not taught well enough to not make mistakes, and you are not allowed to make mistakes. Who thought that system would be a good idea? I wish is WAS a good app to learn on, the interface is nice and it’s easy to just do a quick level while at the bus stop or in a waiting room.
But as someone who already knew a lot of Japanese, it’s really good to practice every day. I have even learned some things. It has helped me keep up my reading and listening even if it’s just a few sentences. I have lingodeer and renshu as well but nothing beats Duo for some quick drills.
I am 3/4 through the Japanese course and hope to have it complete by day 356. Once each skill is level 5 I can keep practicing with no hearts getting in the way. Until that level is reached I keep the tiles on because I don’t hate myself enough to try free typing when the accepted answers list is so limited. I won’t pay for the product because it’s grossly unfinished and some lessons you are just memorising the duo accepted answer to get through. It’s a shame they seem to have abandoned the course, no new answers have been added for years.
In summary, I like the platform, I hate their business model of ‘release a course with the bare minimum done and let the users finished the rest’, and I am getting some good Japanese practice out of it.
I don’t know if this is still true, but there was a time when hearts were just introduced where you would be exposed to words/grammar that hadn’t been introduced yet, encouraging consumption of hearts.
The truth is that, even before hearts, it was a mediocre app. Anything it does, many many apps do much, much better. HeyJapan, Busuu, KawaiiNihongo, and even Memrise. I feel there have to be very few gamified learning apps that are worse than Duo. Duo, when you complete all of it, doesn’t even neatly you plop you down at the pre-intermediate level like Genki/Minna/everything else on the planet does. It leaves you with enough tiny bits of language that you can create your own pigeon language comprised of 2/3 your native language and 1/3 target language. And then you continuously practice the same old content forever and still not ever, nor will ever, learn the language.
Imagine if someone took Genki 1 and 2 and ripped out 125 random pages from each book, sewed what was left together and said “Here’s your Japanese!” That is exactly what Duolingo is. No matter how long per day you spend in it, or how long your streak is, you will never reconstruct the content that is missing.
I haven’t used Duolingo for Japanese, only for recovering my long-forgotten high school Spanish, but I can give one tip: if the heart system bothers you and you don’t want to pay for premium, if you access Duolingo through a browser and not the app, there are no hearts. That’s how I use it for Spanish, haha.
You can visit the web version either on a computer or on your phone’s web browser if you still want the convenience of being able to do it on the go. Once I discovered this, I changed the settings so that it forces me to type my answers instead of selecting from a list of words. It’s more difficult this way (and more frustrating when you type an answer that is technically correct, but which it doesn’t recognize), but you’ll learn more from it, and since you aren’t penalized by losing hearts, you can afford to miss a lot more answers.
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That’s what I would honestly recommend as well and that’s what I’ve been using when still doing the JP->EN and EN->JP trees. I’m not sure what the app offers in addition, but the hearts system does eventually bite, considering that it’s hard to always hit the translation Duolingo expects.
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