Using Duolingo? (the horror!)

Good g-d that’s incredible – it didn’t even occur to me that this would be an outcome of divorcing the act of typing kana from “spelling them with English sounds”… which makes me google-eyed because I just now realized that this means there’s a back-and-forth that I suppose most Japanese people do routinely in order to type kana… :exploding_head: That’s really impressive.

Boom. Mindblowing. :astonished: And I too have the “きょ” is a single thing mindset – oh man I had no idea there was another level of disengagement from English awaiting me. It never even occurred to me that it would be possible for my mind to see か as か.

THANK YOU.

Man this is hard fact. I’m with you, one of the lucky ones who got this out of the way in high school. :slight_smile: I have been minorly shocked at how quickly my fingers have been picking up Cyrillic. There’s a couple ‘bugs’ in there for me of course (н, т, и , and м are the first problematic ones so far), but I know they’re gonna be 100% resolved as I continue to type. I like that they’re not really in the same place as the Roman letters that sound similar, and in fact, there’s kind of a combined spatial/locational and letter-appearance mirroring going on that’s probably a large part of the problem with my fingers picking up on н, т, and и. (Also I really appreciate that the period is the last key before shift, and that comma is shift-period instead of something else. I mean, that’s sensible!)

Thank you so much for sharing your keyboard wisdom!!! It’s gonna change my brain and change my life!! And probably change my reading speed for the better too. It’s no good doing this jumbled-up brain-romaji crap every time I’m trying to read something…:laughing: The solution is so elegant and beneficial too!!!

Genius!!!

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@JFHoll

Everyone learns in their own way. So if it works for you, then that is fine, isn’t it? I think that also pretty much sums up my own experience with it. I think it is very low threshold to start with. Yet, if you really want to become fluent in any language, you will have to do more than entertain yourself with a single resource.

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Not to take away from using kana keyboards but, it’s quite possible to stop thinking of kana in terms of English letters without learning how to type on a kana keyboard. Japanese natives use romaji keyboards and they obviously don’t view their own language in terms of English.

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All Japanese students learn romaji in 3rd grade. That means they have a lot of experience with it by the time they become adults. They don’t consider it a back and forth but just another way of writing Japanese. There’s already 3 writing systems, why not add in a 4th? Because of the ordering of kana in gojuon, Japanese speakers are already used to separating the consonant and vowel portions of kana. They also don’t type in “English” but in romaji, which can strange strange for a native English speaker to read. You often see things written in romaji that don’t have the same phonetics as English, things like “tu” → つ, “ti” → ち, “si” → し. I would often see a truck driving around with part of the company name “Katahuti” written on it. In Japanese script it would be 片淵(かたふち).

Also, there are many ways to type in Japanese. On smart phones, people often use kana keyboards. It just has keys for the consonant, and then you can swipe up, down, left, or right to choose the vowel. Japanese computer keyboards also have a kana mode where they have all of the kana on the keyboard. The most time consuming part of writing in Japanese is selecting the kanji, not using romaji for the input.

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I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. If Duolingo gets you interested in a language, that’s great, but it’s not a good language learning system. In interviews with the creators of Duolingo, they have said that the most important thing is to get people coming back to continue using the product, and to encourage them to maintain their streak, not for them to actually learn the language well. As a result of this, they make the exercises easy so you get a sense of accomplishment and it feels like you’re making progress, but not really. They use multiple choice where there is one really obvious answer, and a bunch of really obviously incorrect answers, they make it so you’re simply repeating what is put in front of you often without comprehension. Learning a language requires you to challenge yourself, it’s not always easy, and you will often get things wrong. However this is often discouraging to people, so they avoid that and instead make easy exercises so people will keep coming back. Also, for the Japanese course on mobile the sentence construction exercise with cards is especially atrocious in how they divide a single word across multiple cards, and have parts of multiple words on a single card. That’s not something they do in any other language.

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You can disable the Leader board. It’s what I did within the first week of using it

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Never heard of Kitsun, what’s the advantage over Anki and other Flashcard apps/websites?

I did not like duolingo, it was quite awful but I’m sure it is easier for those who don’t want to invest that much time into learning a language. A much much better alternative I have found in comparison to duolingo is called Lingodeer! It’s brilliant for me and works great as one aspect of a whole learning process. I have many things I use, but Lingodeer more than fills the gap of duolingo and that little bit of studying per day.

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You’ll never learn a language through any one resource. You’ll never learn a language with Duolingo alone, or with LingoDeer, or Genki, or any other resource. Duo, if you are willing to use it, should be one of your learning resources.

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I didn’t know that! Anyway I don’t mind not having Duoling anymore, it was more of an addiction than a source of knowledge in the end anyways.

I do like Duolingo but only for certain languages. Japanese has a learning curve that is insane. However, I’ve been steady with my french on it for over a year, and can now have small conversations online. Their resources get more bountiful as you get further along in a language.
I just don’t recommend it for those who want to learn Japanese.

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I quite like it for days when I have no leftover energy for deep studying. :^) So I’m still making SOME progress, even if I’m too tired to crack open Genki or whatever else. For me, having a mini lesson on bad days like that really motivate me. If I take a full break I’m too much in danger of not picking it up again for a week.

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Well it depends on what you value in a flashcard app, frankly. I prefer Kitsun.io for the following reasons:

  1. UI/UX is far better than Anki’s (this is really important to me).
  2. Decks have direct feedback options, so if there is something you feel should be changed on a card, you can suggest changes in a couple of clicks, very easily. This means that the decks are continuously improved as users give feedback and the feedback is very easy for creators to incorporate as they just have to “approve” a change to have it applied to the deck for everyone who uses it.
  3. Active development. This is a young project with a driven team.
  4. It’s paid. This is a big plus for me because it means that the team behind it feels responsible for the product.
  5. It’s affordable.
  6. The quality of the decks is high because the tool to make decks are not overly complicated for creators.
  7. The team is accessible. This is good for when you have feedback and, in my experience, they tell you things like they are.
  8. The Known words system means that when you learn a word in one deck, it is marked as Known in every deck so you’re not doing the same thing in all the decks.
  9. The Reader allows you to paste in text and turn words into cards. More features are coming to it iirc and it currently also contains a bunch of texts you can use to generate decks.
  10. Jisho integration means you can simply search for a term, and generate a card from the Jisho entry in a couple of clicks.
  11. The apps for iOS and Android are being Beta tested and are already good and improving fast.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m tired.

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“It’s paid. This is a big plus for me because it means that the team behind it feels responsible for the product.”

This is a weird plus in and of itself. For me, as a programmer I feel the opposite – it’s been sad watching a popular and influential open source project like Anki get monetized and balkanized by companies making incremental improvements at best but what can you do. Of course I am myself on WaniKani, which is one of those companies, but it remains a bummer.

In any case, open source is a beautiful thing and the Internet is built on voluntary contributions to free projects.

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Without getting into the specifics and nuance, herein lies our difference of opinion :wink:.

Edit: I do believe OS can be a good thing in certain circumstances.

Trust me when I say that the Internet wouldn’t exist without it. Every time you load your web browser or smartphone, hundreds of millions of lines of code written by volunteers quietly hum to life. Everything from Java to Android to Python was produced in this way. Code doesn’t need to be corporate to be good.

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Definitely agreed, but paying someone tends to instill a sense of responsibility in them. It’s the same reason a lot of companies insist on paying their interns even though they don’t have to. It also make’s sure no one can say you shouldn’t complain because it’s free. I’d posit that, on average, a paid product is of higher quality than a free one. And that support is likely better too. This makes sense as people can dedicate more time and energy when they don’t have to also work on something else to earn a living.

Yes, OS and “free” are distinct, but the approximation is good enough for the purposes of this discussion.

I think a lot of us on here fit in that category :slight_smile:

Also, I don’t want to hijack this thread anymore by going off on a tangent like this. If there is a thread on this in the Campfire, I’ll gladly join you there or on Discord if you are so disposed.

The vast majority of that code was written by people who were employed by a corporation to contribute to its development. Programmers have to eat, too.
And really that’s a good example of where OSS does well–at underlying plumbing and infrastructure type projects. When it comes to user-facing applications, lots of OSS ends up with awkward and clunky interfaces like Anki. The “code” might be perfectly fine but the user experience is garbage because good programmers are rarely good UX designers.

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Guess I’ve gotten sucked right back in :joy:.

A million times, THIS. OS generally good for libraries with no use restrictions and other plumbing, OS generally ugh for anything consumers have to actually use.

Most of those were probably written by employees of a companies and not by volunteers.

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