Are you also an economist living in N.C.?
5 Likes
Does Duolingo still use robotic voices for the audio? I remember when it first was available, the robotic voices had a lot of pitch accent and intonation mistakes. Given the lack of guidance you get from the platform, that just seemed like the nail in the coffin to me. Of course, it could be fixed with real or better voices eventually.
4 Likes
It sounds like we had a similar experience. I avoided Duolingo because a lot of people said it was bad. I had a friend that was using it who said it was good so I decided to give it a try. It’s great for practicing, which is what I needed. For learning it’s not as good. Luckily I’m taking classes and currently between N4 and N3, so it’s not a problem for me. I’m learning a few things in Duolingo, but it’s mostly practice. It’s definitely been helpful for me.
This is one of my main issues with Duolingo (the first one being that it’s not good at teaching you things, but maybe it’s because I’ve only used the app). It’s too rigrid and some of the translations aren’t accurate…it seems like they take the literal translation and then try to make it sound more natural in English. I need to practice my conversation skills so being able to translate from English to Japanese without having someone else check is helpful. Of course conversation is better, but I have been stressed about finding new conversation partners or classes. It will do in the meantime or as extra practice.
4 Likes
Yep, and they’ve said they won’t change it either because people “trust” the robotic voices more…
9 Likes
I also got a year long streak on Duo and then quit. I started out using it to practice French, Spanish, and German, which I had been learning in a classroom and it was fairly good for review. I very much do not recommend it for actually learning though, especially with grammar, although you can pick up some useful vocab from it. Like others have said, what’s nice about it is that it’s free. Otherwise, people have already named a bunch of better learning apps. However, since that’s apples to oranges, free vs paid, I would like to recommend Speechling. It’s free, has real voices and real feedback and is more comprehensive in certain areas than Duo. The only leg up Duo has is its forums.
5 Likes
Last time I used Duolingo (admittedly a while ago), I remember feeling frustrated that basically everything required pronouns. Everything was 私は and 彼が and such, and it was super unnatural. Has that changed?
4 Likes
I use Duolingo, because it’s free. I’d love to try out LingoDeer as I’ve heard a lot of good about it, but it’s paid and only free for a few lessons or so. I already pay for WK and Japanesepod101, cannot afford all of these apps. So in my opinion, Duolingo is still better than nothing.
But, that being said, I don’t particularly like Duolingo. Bonus points for the cute owl, but I don’t feel I’m learning anything. The sentences often feel out-of-context, and often kind of rigid and unnatural with all the pronouns. Also one can usually figure out the sentence without even looking at the Japanese, just by looking at the English words. I wish there was an option to go typing-only, I’d probably make a ton more mistakes but also learn a ton more.
Also the computer-voice makes it really hard for me to differentiate between sounds, so much so I turned listening practices off completely. And yet I have no difficulty with real Japanese speech.
4 Likes
I have just recently deleted all my progress and took the app off my phone. I found it really stressful after a while to try to compete in the leaderboards. I noticed that I while using it I was focusing on going up the ladder rather than actually learning the language and I started to use it to procrastinate from work lmao. Also it bugged me that I was forced to use gendered pronouns when if I recall correctly, Japanese doesn’t really do that. So yeah, I got rid of it.
4 Likes
Well, my experience is that I tried Duolingo once and got a perfect score on the placement test which just marked everything as known. Then I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to do and closed it 
Arguably, I’m not the target of the app.
15 Likes
This must have changed sometime before I started using Duolingo a year ago; I don’t recall any sentences where the English started with “I” that you couldn’t omit the 私は for. They seem to be putting in the legwork to accept more alternate answers in both JP-to-EN and EN-to-JP, as evidenced by how many comment exchanges there are of the pattern, “Why doesn’t it accept XYZ?” “It does now.”
In hindsight, I probably would have used LingoDeer instead of Duolingo to start learning Japanese. I do think Duo gave me a good head start, and they have added a bunch of grammatical lessons on top of their general philosophy of “let the user figure it out” (which worked okay for me but is not at all for everyone). That said, I was only able to retain the simpler and more common kanji, and at about the 9 month mark or so this was really becoming an issue. I’ve basically dropped Duo now, and I’m looking for other options to continue to learn grammar and work on reading/writing/listening.
2 Likes
Duolingo actually fills in a rather hidden niche that I love it for - introducing someone to the idea of language learning. Duo allows you to very quickly try out a bunch of different languages and see which one you like.
When I’ve talked about my Japanese studies to some people around me, I frequently get, “oh yeah, I’ve thought about learning <insert language here>.” My go-to is to show them Duo and tell them to try it out and maybe explore some other languages they might be interested in. In that way, there’s no other app that I’ve seen that can fill this niche.
On a somewhat related note, I do something similar if anyone tells me they’re interested in learning Japanese. I link them to Tofugu’s hiragana page and tell them to come back after they’ve learned everything. Sadly, no one has, but it’s a really easy way for me to weed out anyone who’s not actually interested in taking on the challenge.
11 Likes
I’ll pop on it once rarely. Just to review random stuff.
To be honest I think Duo would be a better introduction to Japanese than the Tofugu hiragana page. Duo does throw you in learning words straight away (and depending on your approach you can get to greetings or very basic sentences fairly quickly) which feels more rewarding than learning a writing system (especially if you now it is only one of three systems!) I am glad I found the Hiragana and Katakana pages, on Tofugu, and I used them to actually learn what I was struggling to pick up naturally, but if I had started with them I don’t think I would have persisted!
4 Likes
Engineer in NC 
3 Likes
Also, Duolingo has separate pages to learn hiragana and katakana these days, which also helps a lot. On the other hand, Tofugu really teaches by means of the visuals, whereas Duolingo enforces it by teaching you words.
1 Like
While DuoLingo might not be great for Japanese I can’t be mad at it for making people interested in languages.
My nearly 60 year old mother started using it recently to learn Polish. I can get behind it’s appeal for casual language learners.
10 Likes
Yeah, I noticed they’d added those, it’s a shame they still lack any description about how they work as a writing system, how voiced consonants work, etc. Not to come across as a LingoDeer shill, but…
Duo vs LingoDeer - the basic grid is the same
But… adds the context of stroke order and actual reading material…
4 Likes
they were still making sentences with a lot of unnecessary pronouns when i stopped using it, but one could always answer without the pronouns. i made a bit of a game out of stripping as many superfluous parts out of my answers as possible.
my dad is in his seventies and has started learning arabic thanks to duo. and while there’s obviously better ressources for learning arabic than duo, there’s very few which are accessible to an elderly gentleman living in a mountain village.
16 Likes
The advantage of starting someone with Tofugu is that it introduces the same methodology that goes into WK, which would be the immediate follow-up for anyone who comes back.
While Duo is good to help someone get started, it’s something I’d move them away from as soon as I can. With Japanese specifically, I know where to start so I can point someone in an immediate direction, but with other languages that’s not the case.
Like many things in life, language learning is 80% about just showing up. That’s how you tell who’s serious.
6 Likes
While I do agree, a problem I often see across the internet is a large emphasis, if not sometimes an obsession, with finding the perfect method. It’s not to say there aren’t good and bad ones, but just showing up and doing something still gets you 80% of the way there.
So, no Duo isn’t a great study resource, but if it gets someone started on language learning and it keeps them coming back, then it gets the job done.
7 Likes