What I meant is that (gamified) apps work for specific things. They work for vocab and kanji mostly because both require very limited context to make their learning effective. That doesn’t work as well for grammar or learning a language in general, which requires repeated variable context.
Also, seeing the Duolingo posts on Reddit I very often see people rabbit-holed into the gamification aspect of an app, focusing on earning XP points, rather than language learning itself. So as a word of caution I wanted to warn against that sort of focus .
I definitely get your point. Its probably a more personal motivation thing since I don’t think I will enjoy consuming media I am not interested in otherwise just to learn the language. Anyway, still only level 3 so I have atleast more than a few weeks of kanji remaining before I look at grammar options anyway
At least for me, the thing is… even if the content wasn’t what I would usually be interested in, actually using the language was already a lot of fun by itself. I read some rather boring graded readers, and I still remember how elated I was that I could actually understand what was being said there. (That feeling will fade over time, but by then you’ll hopefully be good enough to consume content you are actually interested in.)
Conversely: The gamification of WK might get you far, but if you’re not doing anything else, there’s a good chance that sooner or later you would get frustrated that you put so much work into “learning Japanese” but still can’t do anything with it.
I may actually prefer an autograder over reading something just to learn language . I guess its just different strokes for different folks. I have been following the tofugu guide so I think I will wait till level 20-30 anyway to jump into grammar (hopefully also with SRS).
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