Duolingo - TWO LANGUAGE-O

[SecretAsianMan]

I've actually been doing the Japanese course (for 29 days apparently) and... I kind of agree it's not great.  I've never done another Duolingo course before so I don't know how they compare but a lot of the lessons just throw completely new things at you with no pronunciation or any other real way of figuring out what the sentence means other than random guessing.  There's really no attempt at teaching you sentence structure or grammar either.  I understand a good amount of it because I already speak Chinese which has similar structure but to someone without a background in any kind of Asian language I can't really see this helping.  Maybe once the vocab has been built they get into some of that but from what I've seen thus far it may as well just be flash cards.

[Jutranjo]

I'm on 85 days of German. I've barely used any in the last 4+ years, I used to be better at it. This is a nice refresher, it helps that I'll do at least one little thing each day. Doing German into English translation is slightly harder than I thought it would be at times.

 

It often reminds you how shit english is at any kind of pronouns though.

[aoanla]

I'm really sad at how bad the Japanese Duolingo course apparently is - I basically completely flaked out of learning Japanese last year (after 2 years of failing to pick up vocab), and I was hoping that the Duolingo course might be a good way to try another way at getting back into it.

(Annoyingly, apparently Duolingo Russian is also not one of the best Duolingo courses either...)

[Twig]

Well, vocab is probably the one thing it is good at teaching, so if that's your hurdle, it might make a good supplement.

[tabacco]

I've found Duolingo to be great at reminding me how to speak Spanish after years of disuse, and really bad at teaching me any language I don't already speak.

[aoanla]

11 hours ago, Twig said:

Well, vocab is probably the one thing it is good at teaching, so if that's your hurdle, it might make a good supplement.

Sadly, I hear it also doesn't teach kanji, and I'd quite like to actually be able to read and write Japanese, not elementary school Japanese...

[Twig]

Yep sure doesn't teach kanji. You "learn" some, but it doesn't teach you how to write. My original post on this (end of the last page) goes into more detail on why I think it's bad. ):

 

REALLY WISH IT WAS GOOD!!

[SecretAsianMan]

Yeah I wish it was better too.  I can see it being useful as a refresher but as an introduction it's woefully lacking.  There is ZERO explanation on what kanji/hiragana/katakana are and they constantly mix them all in the same lesson as though being presented with them all at once is sufficient to understand everything.  What really drives me nuts is that a bunch of the time there's NO pronunciation at all so I'm not even developing an ear for hearing or speaking the language.

[miffy495]

On 7/10/2017 at 2:01 PM, tabacco said:

I've found Duolingo to be great at reminding me how to speak Spanish after years of disuse, and really bad at teaching me any language I don't already speak.

 

This, but replace "Spanish" with "French".

[Jutranjo]

I don't know what it does but I made a club. Code to join is UKFFPN

[SecretAsianMan]

What language is it for (or does that matter)

[jennegatron]

Jut has been learning German. I'm not sure what groups do, but I'll def join.

[Jutranjo]

I don't know what groups do. I'm only learning german. I put the description of the group as Faule Daume but it didn't have any language specifications anywhere.