That immediately destroyed any trust with them. When you put out educational material, it has to be correct. That has to be the foundation.

EDIT: Also it felt like the whole game was written from an "Indo-European" perspective. For example, in Turkish there is a word "bir" (read [biɾ]) which literally means "one" which is sometimes used akin to indefinite articles (a/an). But they're not exactly indefinite articles, and sentence usually makes sense without them and when you speak fast you omit them. But in Duolingo they taught as if you should translate "the X" without "bir" and "a/an X" with "bir". That's not even remotely close to the truth (and made me get all "article" questions wrong). In Turkish definiteness is mostly denoted with accusative case. There is no single language construct similar to "article", you infer it from other kinds of information. For example "dolaba bira koy" : "put A beer in the fridge" vs "dolaba biraYI koy" : "put THE beer in the fridge". You add +I accusative suffix to "bira" (beer). This was not even mentioned in Duolingo. It also makes sense that they don't mention this sicne this is probably super advanced nuanced speaking, but then be consistent and don't teach that "bir" distinction to beginners as well.

For instance there's no single way to translate "I ran" in French, it could be "j'ai courru" or "je courrais" depending on context and depending no the lesson Duolingo will favor one or the other, leading English speakers to write puzzled comments like "I thought the imperfect was 'I used to run' or 'I was running', why is it 'I ran' here?" And the answer is "it's more complicated than that, but Duolingo won't teach you that".

And there are no hard rules. In that sentence you can't just put +I to make it definite as I described above "ayiyi cikabilir" << this sentence doesn't mean anything. I think this is something your brain has to pick up implicitly while you're speaking/listening, I'm not sure if someone can discretely provide you a set of rules that always works. Just like in German you cannot translate "the" > "der". This is like Duolingo saying 'the'='der' and rejecting 'das' and 'die'.

So, it is not fine, it is wrong. And the wrong thing is not that Duolingo has a bug, it is that it has made-up grammar rules, which users still have to learn. If they never learned this rule, they'd be as well understood.

(I know you were replying to commenter discussing French, but I'm guessing something similar is going on)

Any decent language learning course should try to immerse you in the target language as soon as possible, forcing you to actually think in the language instead of your own. There are many ways to do this, for instance making you answer questions. Instead of telling you "translate 'the cat is black' in French" they'd show you a picture of a black cat and ask you "Quelle est la couleur du chat?" and you'd have to answer "Le chat est noir". No English involved, like in real life. The problem of course is that such an approach is hard to correct by a dumb algorithm, especially as the concepts being taught become harder.

Very interesting! In Russian, the accusative suffix would play exactly the opposite role. While there's no real way to say the beer without additional context, you can say:

поставь пиво в холодильник / put the beer in the fridge

поставь пива в холодильник / put SOME beer into the fridge

not a native speaker, just living and studying russian in moscow

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian

[2]https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B8...

Yup, pretty much that. Or like that one time when we went binge-shopping on craft beers, but there was only enough space in the fridge for a couple of bottles; so that was a normal request about an hour before we were to watch a movie. Which is pretty much the exact situation you described :)

I'm a native speaker, and I wasn't even aware of partitive case. They never taught us about it, even though a mind-numbing amount of time was spent cramming the name of the usual six cases into our heads.

I only got more interested in linguistics after moving to the US, and, sadly, only took one class in college on it.

Thanks for noticing this, I just learned something!

As a side note, I also mixed up genitive and accusative cases.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian

That's not to excuse Duolingo obviously.

In my opinion you could go even further an say that they have an English bias.

If you want good content, you need good editors, and they are neither cheap, nor easy to find.

The reason why companies try to save money with editors is that they don‘t „scale“ (one dev and a designer can program an interface that can be used for 20.000 different questions, but you need a lot of people to come up with those questions)

I got all the questions correctly, but:

- Given capitalization I was forced to use word order that didn't come naturally. Mind you, what the app requested isn't _wrong_ but it's certainly not the only way to do it. If they were enforcing a rigid wrong order they were incorrectly marking as failures usage that I would argue is more natural, at least given my particular background (Southern). I went with it, but I was adjusting to the app.

- They repeated the sentences and some vocabulary a lot, so if you had any gaps or couldn't remember one particular word you might get three questions wrong, which would have a large impact on your placement.

- There's something inherently weird about the vocabulary, Duolingo-style. This doesn't go well with the previous point.

Overall it felt rigid and random. In any case Duolingo does not correlate at all with fluency. Duolingo correlates well with being trained in Duolingo.

I came here to say the same thing. Spanish from one country is "wrong" in another one. A lot of people doesn´t understand that it´s just not your flavor of the language. It´s almost the same that If I, that speak Spanish, commented how wrong is Portuguese because is similar to Spanish but not the same.

Maybe the mistake is to announce the course as Portuguese instead of, for example, "Brazilian Portuguese".

At the moment I'm supplementing duolingo by nattering away to my father in French and asking the half-French guy at work how to say various things, but if the app is teaching me things that are plain wrong, I'll have to either find another app or start taking real life classes, which is why it would be useful to know what else is broken.

My chronological progression of picking up French via apps/courses (lots of trial-and-error):

1. Duolingo

2. Michel Thomas audio course - this has its critics but it gave me a much more solid, if limited, foundation on grammar.

3. Lingvist - I was lucky to find this early. Added around 2000 words to my vocabulary (yes they claimed ~5000 - that was inaccurate; conjugations and plurals are counted separately). Today you need to pay $23 / month to get the same number of words.

4. Clozemaster - it offers a lot more words, so I got a paid subscription. Got disappointed really fast though because its automated method to offer mass sentences really shows its flaws quickly: there are many errors and nonsensical cloze placement. I got tired of flagging.

5. Assimil - seems good, but without any gamification or anything I can play on my phone while waiting, commuting, etc., this soon dropped off the radar.

6. Speechling - this one should not have the problem of Clozemaster or Duolingo, because they have a human teacher correcting your speech. I imagine their sentences are more carefully curated as well. I started the trial, but dropped after a while because I found I just couldn't allocate the time to sit in a quiet place and record myself for an extended amount of time. Yes, it's a genuine "it's not you, it's me" thing. I really like their recent features and will probably try this again during a less hectic life period. Hongyu (the CEO) is super responsive too, which is great.

7. Glossika - this is what I'm currently on. It's not perfect; their main thing is you hear someone saying X in English and a moment later the equivalent in French. They offer mass repetitions as well, with the same class of problems: occasional inaccurate translations. The reason I picked this one instead of Speechling is not quality: it allows me to listen to mass sentences while doing mindless boring stuff that I have to do anyway (e.g.: doing the dishes, walking to/from the subway station, etc.). This allows me to get French exposure every day, even if not perfect, which ends up meaning more exposure than what Speechling can give me.

8. I'm a subscriber of one more app, I can't believe I forgot to add this one the first time: Kwiziq. They have a very specific target: teach you grammar from A0 (i.e.: the level below A1) to C1. My main problem is that they don't have an "aging" feature. Something I learned fully in A1 9 months ago will be forever marked as "mastered", despite my having forgotten it completely. Nevertheless I continue to be a happy subscriber. It's fun to finish a quick grammar quiz here and there as you're waiting for food, queueing for stuff, etc.

CEO of Speechling here. We'll work on (7). It's trivial to implement. We want the functionality of (7) to be better and free.

Hongyu

Everything else e.g.: Assimil is a workflow interruption, a new habit I have to assimilate, so it becomes a lot harder to do consistently over a long period of time.

After this thread, I plan to move that step up as a check on DuoLingo.

Since then by my estimate I know roughly about 4000 more French words, and reading lemonde.fr is still a struggle. Doing much better with Tintin though.

I've learned languages with duolingo.. and by that I don't mean duolingo will teach you a language.

There's two things that I feel that almost everyone misses.

#1: Using duolingo alone will get you to about an A2-B1 level in comprehension and an A1-A2 level in writing and speaking.

This is just the basics of a language.. enough to understand basic expressions. You're never going to learn a language without further practice and tools. Spending time in books, trying to form your own thoughts. Duolingo is a great start, but if you never progress beyond it, of course you're not going to learn a language.

#2: and most important. When you complete a course you're not done.

I see this all of the time, people just get to the last exercise and stop.

You're not going to learn a language this way because most people can't retain a 2000+ word vocabulary by only seeing a word a couple of times.

There's a reason why your "strength" in categories decreases as time passes.. because it's unlikely that you've actually remembered every single word you were taught.

I've participated in a large number of duolingo related discussion over the years and one thing stands out is that there is a strong correlation between people that think you can't use it to learn a language and people that go straight through the course, reach the end, and stop.

Anyway, it has its flaws, and is far from perfect, but I can't imagine having a better product that does not come with a fee.

To get to A2 you need a real tutor and real communication experience. I used Verbling to find a tutor and I traveled to Eastern Europe over the summer to practice and only after hundreds of hours of practice was I able to communicate in Russian to any degree even approaching A1.

No you don't. I'm French, I dropped out of school at 16 and picked up English later in life without using any formal method of learning. I started by memorizing enough vocabulary to read simpler English, after which I began reading popular fiction and watched movies with subtitles (in English) until it clicked. My understanding of the language is more based on intuition (sheer memorization of exposure to it through cultural mediums) than on memorizing the grammar rules book. The brain makes the connections as to what seems correct or not based on patterns. I don't think my skills are good enough to write literature but surely communication isn't a problem.

Duolingo didn't exist at the time, but I believe it would have helped me learn faster considering the way it introduces languages is quite similar to how I started learning and it does so in a more interactive, fun manner.

* Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment).

* Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters.

* Can describe in simple terms aspects of their background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.

No way you need a tutor to get that. Duolingo course seems about right depending on language and language learning experience.

I have more recommendations if you want them.

More complex languages, yes, but for languages like swedish/norwegian/danish where there is very little grammar, I find it's much easier to progress within the limits of their program.

Swedish/Norwegian/Danish do not really have "little grammar", but for an English speaker, there probably won't be any need to explicitly learn the grammar, since it works mostly like English. But on the flipside, they are just as difficult as English for speakers of unrelated languages.

For a period in the UK there was no English grammar taught in schools. This caused me great problems in Russian class (second high school language) as I had no idea there were cases in English and so had no reference for why a case was needed and what it did. The entirety of my English grammar training was learning a poem by rote for homework, which I didn't do ("A nouns the name of anything [...]"). I learnt the little grammar I know from French lessons. So, YMMV depending on the English speaker.

Most English 'grammer' discussed in the Anglophone world (split infinitives WTF? English doesn't have infinitives) is gibberish...

I ran, she ran, he ran, they ran, we ran, y'all ran.

I run, she runs, he runs, they run, we run, y'all run.

I'll run, she'll run, he'll run, they'll run, we'll run, y'all'll run.

I thought I'd run, he thought he'd run, they thought they'd run.

We'll have wished we ran, they'll have wished they ran, he'll have wished he ran.

What exactly do you want to teach here? The only weirdness to the rule is that he and she runs with an "s", everything else is the same.

I love you. You love me. They love him. He loves them.

I want you. You want me. They want him. He wants them.

In Russian the above is far different because the word order can be switched for emphasis.

The only thing in English worth teaching is "I have" vs "I am" and almost every language has that same problem as well (Je suis vs J'ai in French).

The hard part with English is that our spelling makes zero sense, unlike Russian or French. The grammar is really quite straightforward.

Even verb morphology is a bit more complex than you've called out here.

This definitely rings true. I was using it in the hopes it would help me provide some structure to teaching my kid portuguese (and it does to some extent), but by the time the app says a lesson is "complete", my kid is still a long ways away from having memorized it (and he's 5). I tend to complement it with a boogie board and repetition over the course of several days to really nail down new vocab.

I also wish it had some feature to introduce foreign concepts (e.g. gendered articles in portuguese). It's very awkward to try to explain the difference between `the`, english `a`, and portuguese `a` (and the remaining counterparts `o`, `um`, `uma`) for example, and the word matching exercises can get quite confusing.

When I do duolingo, I usually try to do about a two to one ratio of strengthening skills or going back to older lessons with taking new lessons.

I did the first three levels of Ukranian and when I went to Lvyv I picked out a couple of hundred words in shops and restau

Could I speak? No, but Duolingo gets you onto the pitch faster and better than anyone else - it gets you in play fast - so you can start learning the language properly

I spent a while using Busuu instead, which presents something more like a curriculum and lets you formulate your own answers to questions which are then reviewed by native speakers (in return for you reviewing the submissions of others). I found that incredibly effective because I wasn't stuck with putting strange sentences in the right order, I could get creative about how I described a red flag or a holiday I went on. More often than not I'd plug words and sentences into Google Translate, check dictionaries when I wasn't confident about a certain suggestion, and generally refactor the sentences until my gut said I had something that flowed reasonably well. Very intense and deliberate but it didn't take long to start posting to Facebook in Spanish. The only problem was that my writing was miles ahead of my speaking.

That's pretty funny - I was taught in my german class that "ich bin warm" directly translates to I'm feeling hot, but colloquially it means "I am gay". And here, the same phrase in spanish just means horny.

Transliteration is definitely littered with booby traps.

One of the girls in the group responded "Non merci, je suis pleine" -- word-for-word "No thanks, I'm full". And got a laugh, because the connotation was not "I'm no longer hungry", but "I'm pregnant".

They also taught me the helicopter joke.

Ha, I do that too sometimes (GT), and when it doesn't work, I do this:

https://translate.google.com/#en/en/Blame%20Google%20Transla... and share it with the person I am talking or writing to.

Just first change the language of the right side text box inf GT to the target language you want, or in the URL above, change the second language code from en (English) to de or es (German or Spanish), for example.

Also, it's interesting that if you toggle the translation from lang A -> lang B to lang B -> lang A, the result is sometimes not the same as the original you first typed in lang A.

e.g. try the above phrase I used (Blame Google Translate) with DE (German) as the target lang.

All that said, GT is still a useful and fun tool. I play around with the audio outputs of the languages sometimes.

That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say. Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound (for example "que" that would be expected to sound k-u-e but actually sounds like k-e). The entonation is another story but despite of it, your pronunciation should be clear enough to understand you.

Speak too slow or sound unsure and plenty of people will default to English to give you a hand instead of waiting for you to figure it out. It has nothing to do with the phonetic simplicity, although it does help when you compare it to English, for example, which might as well be lawless because there’s practically no connection between the spoken and written form.

Sanskrit is like that too, pretty much, i.e. as far as:

"what you read is pretty much what you have to say"

goes. There is only one way to pronounce any letter or compound letter or word. In fact Hindi is too, except for regional differences in pronunciation, and both are unlike English in this respect, where a non-native speaker often fumbles to pronounce some words right (even apart from accent), because the right way to say a word can be very different from how it looks when written (if you try to build up the sound of the word from its component letters, at least in many cases).

Examples of this are: cut and put, argue and vague.

IIRC George Bernard Shaw made a well-known observation that I learned as a kid in English class; he is supposed to have said something like: in English, going logically by how you say / spell parts of other words, you could spell "fish" as "ghoti", i.e. "f" as in the "gh" of "laugh", "i" as in the "o" of "women", and "sh" as in the "ti" of "nation".

>Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound

In Spanish, the letter combination "ll" (two ells) sounding like a "y" is another unexpected one, as in "amarillo" (yellow) for example.

https://translate.google.com/#en/es/yellow

Click on the speaker icon under "amarillo" to hear it spoken.

"j" being pronounced as "h" is another one, at least for speakers coming from English.

Interesting stuff.

Well, if you're coming from a European language background, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to benchmark on. I mean, there's three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji) for starters! And then unlike European languages, it's not alphabetical and kanji is not even really syllabic - which means, the background you need to get to be able to read texts is huge.

E.g., for Spanish, I can read the newspaper (not understand yet, but just reproduce, look for words I recognize, etc.) without even touching a language course. And if I get the basics, I can see grammatical structure, and given common Romance background, get about 20% of vocabulary for free just from knowing another European language (well, not true for all European ones, but for many it is).

It's like in martial arts you learn kata first, though if you get to apply it later you don't do the same kata, you do something else - but to do it, you have to learn to do kata first.

That's kind of their approach. I agree that in case of Japanese they could do better. E.g. if they explained what is explained here: https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/ - and they have space for such texts, but they are not using it for Japanese - it would save me some frustration and trying to figure out what these weird things are doing inside the phrases. Once you get the principle, it kinda clicks in place. So with the help of some other sources, so far it's not too bad for me with Duo and Japanese I feel. Though of course I don't think it's possible to use it alone without some auxiliary materials.

It's mediocre at teaching you how to write, bad at teaching you to listen, and useless at teaching you how to speak.

I've found that if you just grind through lessons without actually reading the supporting material, you don't learn much at all. If you actually read the supporting material you'll learn a lot more.

Duolingo is best used as a tool in a toolbox of language learning tools. It's good for reinforcement learning, but not great for actually developing an understanding.

As an analogy, you could learn algebra by looking at a lot of examples and working through worksheets of algebra problems, but you're not going to actually understand what you're doing, or learn very well.

I’ve yet to find a single app that beat out a one-time read through of a Japanese grammar guide.

That being said memorization apps can be useful, such as for vocabulary, but I’ve yet to find an app that markets itself as that.

What about Anki?

https://djtguide.neocities.org/guide.html

I also disagree about Japanese, I used to it learn the kanas and I am continuing to learn with it.

I don't understand why there are people that hate on this free language tool so much.

You’re much better off reading an actual textbook.

I personally don’t hate on Duolingo because it’s free but it tends to waste people’s times and gives them false impressions about language learning.

And at least on Anki or Memrise you can select decks that match what you want to learn, such as getting the basics to order at a restaurant or ask for directions. On Duolingo I think I've learned how to say "the bishop sends a pineapple to the queen" before I learned how to say "bathroom".

This is interesting.

I took six years of French in high school + college, and did immersion in Québec. I had not spoken French since then, so a couple years ago when I was planning a trip to France I got Duolinguo and worked through the French course to refresh. I didn't notice anything odd about it. And in France I was able to communicate with people, though one person asked if I was Canadian -- apparently I have an accent.

Did I perhaps learn French incorrectly?

It's quite common for correct answers not to be accepted. In particular, often some technically correct literal translation is accepted but the almost certainly correct colloquial translation is not.

For example: "Tu manges ça"

Literally this means "you eat that" or "you are eating that". However, since it's hard to imagine someone saying "you are eating that" in real life (why would you ever say that?) I interpret this as a question ("are you eating that?") or as a command to a child ("Eat that!" or a bit more literally, "you shall eat that!")

However, the accepted answer was indeed "You are eating that.".

By the way, this isn't even taking into account the fact that "ça" should quite commonly be translated as "this", not "that" -- the distinction between "this" and "that" isn't the same in French as it is in English, and it's totally wrong to assume that "ça" should always be translated as "that" and "ceci" as "this". In fact, I think "are you eating this?" is orders of magnitude more likely to be the correct translation of "tu manges ça" than "you are eating that.".

I've only shared one, but there are a million examples like this on DuoLingo.

There are also some translations that are just objectively wrong: "He reads the menu" should be "il lit la carte", but on DuoLingo it's "il lit le menu". Nobody says "le menu" for "menu" in France. (They do say that in Québec, but nowhere was it indicated that I should be answering in nonstandard Québec dialect. "il lit la carte" was marked wrong here even though it's what you would say in France, the primary French-speaking country in the world.)

Similar to the "ça" == "this" fallacy, DuoLingo seems to believe that any phrase in which "le" or "la" appears has to involve "the" in the English translation. "You help kids" is apparently wrong for "Tu aides les enfants". The expected translation was "you're helping the children". Yes, that's one possible meaning, but "les enfants" isn't necessarily definite here: "tu aides les enfants" can certainly mean that "you help children" (or "kids", see the paragraph below), in general, whereas "you're helping the kids" implies some fixed, well-defined set of kids.

Let alone French: there are even cases in which DuoLingo's writers don't seem to understand English. For example, any sentence with "les enfants" has to be translated with the overly formal "children": "kids" isn't accepted, even though I, a native English speaker, would say "kids" something like 99.9% of the time.

(also, as my other comments make clear, the fact that my first French immersion was in Québec probably explains a lot, if you think Duolinguo is more Québecois)

It hasn't done a whole lot for my listening or speaking skills, but to be fair I often disable the listening and speaking exercises since I tend to do the exercises at work while I'm waiting for something to compile.

Duolingo will not make you fluent in a language, but it can give you the basics to build upon.

Human Japanese is great for gentle explanations of grammar, but its flashcards are horrible, so one can't get the spaced repetition needed to remember everything it throws at you. Memrise is fantastic for vocabulary with its spaced repetition, but I couldn't string a sentence together, as Memrise (at least the course I did) mostly ignores grammar. Duolingo is great for practicing reading and writing sentences, checking the comments for sanity if the sentence looks fishy. But it doesn't try and teach anything, just get it wrong until you get it right. Does sentence order matter? Why do we use "wa" here and "ga" there? Duolingo doesn't say.

An app that combines actual lessons with spaced practice sessions would make the whole process a lot smoother.

Looks like fun, but not a tool that would teach you to speak a language correctly.

It can't be expensive to get this right, not considering what Duolingo must be doing in revenue, so why is it that way?

The streak is actually the only thing I really like about it, I want to keep it going because it shows me how long I've been working on it. For everything else I completely agree with you, Duolingo is borderline worthless for actually learning a language IMO. I can make a random list of complaints in no particular order:

- The spaced repetition aspect is ridiculously poorly calibrated, at least for me. Basic words decay way too fast which means that if I actually try to keep the skills "golden" (in the pre-crown era) I keep drilling the same basic skills again and again. Anki or Memrize manage that tremedously better. It's not even that complicated to implement correctly, I wonder why it's so crap. Maybe to keep you coming back and stretch the existing content? Now with the crown system they got rid of skill decay altogether, instead having you drill the same sentences an ungodly amount of time to reach a higher skill level. Also no matter how much I've drilled any lesson the majority of the exercises are asking you to translate foreign-to-native instead of the other way around, which would be more interesting as you improve.

- The actual "lessons" for each skills are so bare bones that they're basically useless. I think they know that since I don't think they're accessible at all in the android app. I know that grammar isn't sexy for most but if you want to learn a language you'll have to bite the bullet at some point, an english speaker will have some trouble learning the nuances of the perfect and imperfect past in romance languages by examples alone.

- Meanwhile, on top of not actually teaching you proper grammar they like to mix concepts in the same lessons, because otherwise it wouldn't be confusing enough. For instance the Portuguese subjunctive course contains examples that are actually imperative but "by chance" happen to have the same form as the subjunctive. Because obviously the subjunctive is so trivial that you have to spice things up by adding a completely different tense in there.

- The actual vocabulary they teach you is absurd. You can do the entire tree and not know how to say basic stuff, but you'll be able to say "the painter opens the power outlet" or "my tiger ate my pillow". Those are real examples.

- Worse than weird vocabulary you also have very confusing sentences. For instance take a look at this: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2121481$from_email=comment&... "Se nós nos encontrássemos mais vezes?" which is translated by "If we met more often?". What does that even mean? It's not even a full sentence. And that's for the past subjunctive lesson, you know, that trivial thing that definitely requires trash sentences like those. And it's been there for 4 years judging by the comments, so the authors of the course stand by it.

- These types of weird sentences are super common and they keep you wondering if you're not getting an idiom of the language or if it's just a super weird sentence. 90% of the time it's the latter.

I don't understand why Duolingo is so popular, IMO Memrise is massively better. It's a lot more focused, it only pretends to teach you words and simple phrases, but at least it does the job. If you want to learn a language buy a good grammar book, a dictionary and drill vocab on Anki or Memrise. Use something like lang-8 to practice your writing. Forget Duolingo.

I do enjoy their "Duolingo Stories" service though, but there's not enough content there to keep you busy for very long and there's no "replay" value.

- "[E] se nós nos encontrássemos mais vezes?"

- "What if we met each other more?" (ie, what if we saw each other more often?)

* Many of the English translations don't seem like idiomatic English. Sometimes I think it is even grammatically incorrect. This has made me worried about some of the Japanese not being super great as well. With other people chiming in about how languages they already knew having this problem, it doesn't look great.

* I agree with numbers. They way Duolingo handles numbers, days, months, etc is to me worse than the traditional way. It took a long time to get decent at numbers, and I screw them up a bit. I don't know any of the days of the week, but I know what day of the week words look like. They only ever include one day of the week word it the word bank, so you never actually have to learn.

* On the subject of the word bank, I think if the incorrect words where more plausible. For many lessons, you don't need the Japanese input. The word bank only provides one plausible English sentence.

* It needs more sentence variety. For example, if a less has "The tea is hot." and "The ramen is cool.", why not also add "The tea is cool." and "The ramen is hot."? I find if Duo selects the same lesson a few days in a row, I start to memorize the answers and can punch them in without needing the input.

* I can form original sentences. I'm not very fast at it, but I think that is to be expected. I don't think I'll get better until I start trying to actually speak to people.

* The bigger problem I have is a lack of vocabulary. Duolingo seems to like to jump around a lot, never getting good enough at any one thing. Even in a situation where you are able to get by if you stick to a script, eg at a restaurant, there are still gaps that would prevent me from doing everything in Japanese. Looking at Memerise, it seems to focus on giving you more depth. For example, Duolingo taught me how to say "How are you?" and respond "I'm fine.". Later I've been able to add "I'm tired." and "I'm scared." Memerise teaches you "I'm fine.", "I'm tired.", "I'm happy.", "I'm angry.", "I'm hungry.", and "I'm sick.". That feels more useful.

* The audio quality is crappy. Sometimes it sounds like the syllables are clipping into each other or something. Sometimes it seems like their text to speech engine got confused about where word boundaries are. I took a brief look at Memerise's Japanese course, and the audio quality is much better.

* About 50% of the time when I try to tap the button to replay the audio clip, it seems to think I want to quit the lesson.

* It would be nice if there was something you could tap to temporarily see Japanese sentences with spaces between words.

* While I expect Duolingo would never do it, I think a few lessons on innuendos would be useful. It would save some embarrassing situations.