The design of the app isn’t an accident. They want you to start trying immediately. The testing effect works even for vocabulary. If you guess which of four words is the Spanish for milk you’re more likely to remember the answer than if you’re just told it. When you put effort into learning something you’re more likely to remember it, even when the effort is as trivial as a multiple choice test.
> The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc.
None of this is wrong to be honest. I wouldn’t use any Duolingo course that hadn’t been out of beta for more than a year because there are often plentiful mistakes.
> I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular.
It’s actually pretty good at getting you from nothing to novice for European languages as far as reading goes. And it’s free and gamified, which helps a lot with motivation. You might be mistaking the feeling of learning with actually learning too. Almost everyone does. That’s why most people do massed practice (cramming) instead of distributed (multiple reviews) and interleaved (practice different skills together, not one at a time, even though massed works worse. You feel like you’re learning more with massed.
Although I haven't tried other apps (so I don't have a baseline for comparison), their methodology has proven quite effective for me.
I quit Duolingo for Japanese because it was super slow and boring. I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites and started reading native material/talking to natives.
Currently going through KKLC so focusing on kanji/vocab... I passed the JLPT N5 (admittedly so easy it's useless as a certificaiton) with six months of studying from scratch, and I approximately N4 level now (~1 year in).
I know everyone has different goals and timelines, but 2 years of Duolingo feels like it covers what you can learn in <4 months by yourself.
Nope. Perhaps you are right.
> I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites
Would you mind telling which ones you went through?
I used the following:
- Genki I, II
The classic Japanese textbooks. They're pretty good and have tons of exercises. Do the exercises!
- Tae Kim's Guide
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
Alternative guide written by one guy. Very good as reference or quick learning. Used it to review Genki material.
- Japanese: The Manga Way
I thought this would be stupid but in some ways I liked it more than the other resources. Every chapter goes through grammar/expressions and it uses real manga examples. Vocab is translated for you. Not necessary with the other two resources but if you like manga or want something different, it's fun.
- Japanese Ammo with Misa
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSyd8tXJoEJKIXfrwkPdbA
Long (20+ mins) lectures on grammar with a lot of examples. Goes on tangents often and some videos are too long but a great source of vocab, native expressions, etc.
- Anki
You've probably heard of this. I currently use it for kanji but you can use it for whatever I prefer making my own flashcards but there's pre-made decks for vocab from Genki, Tae Kim, grammar etc. I'd link to some but they also include links to pirated PDFs so don't want to get the mods mad at me.
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With all of that said, the most helpful thing for me has been reading native content in Chrome with this extension -> https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ if you don't read, write, etc. you will not retain stuff. You will start out not understanding anything but slowly you will start reading without even translating to English.
You will hit a wall with vocab without kanji study but you should be good to go for some time with this.
As next steps, I've installed Yomichan and I plan on purchasing a copy of Genki I.
Thank you very much for the pointers!
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/abo...
Sure as children we learned our natives language by hearing it for years but the point is you can't magically have ten years of everyday language input when learning a foreign language. So then as adult it is way more efficient to learn the underlying rules. If there really was a more efficient method universities would have ditched their curricula for it. But from my experiences they don't and they don't recommend Duolingo either.
Yeah, maybe "quite effective" is overstating it.
So, if after two years of using Duolingo you cannot read all the katakana and cannot make a sentence more complex then xxx ha yyy desu it just totally prove how bad the application is. And what's even more damageable is that user think they are making progress and then do not focus on real, useful material.
It's definitely not as good as having a tutor or structured lessons, but for getting the basics down, when complemented with other study, it seems perfectly fine to me.
- Each lesson has a guide that shows what's new. This is a bit hard to find on the website (click on the lightbulb above the "Practice" button for any lesson), and (last I checked) isn't available at all on mobile.
- There's a discussion board associated with each sentence. This can be immensely helpful for getting tips from more experienced speakers regarding various tricky aspects of the language.
Is it enough to build fluency by itself? Doubtful. But I find it very helpful for building vocab with a ~20-minute daily investment.
Sounds like machine learning just met machine teaching.
If you want much better results, memrise and flash card apps are WAY better. Learn as much vocab, grammar, irregular verbs, etc. there.
You need to complete that with dialogues. On youtube you can often find these, either teaching videos which are great, or tv shows/movies with subs.
That app have no lesson, nothing is explained, there is just quizzes slapped on your face until you remember the good answer. The distractors are bad (you can find answer using capitalization in some case), sentences seems to have been generated automatically etc. I cannot fathom how one can learn anything with that nor why it is so popular.