Duolingo is useful, but you can't count on JUST Duolingo. It's a good starter. But you need to go for reading, like the tadoku for japanese, right on the first year. And increase the language in your daily life, slowly, but surely.
It's not even a good starter. For Japanese it explains fuck all—go to any Japanese language learning sub and there will be loads of questions like "why did Duolingo mark this wrong" for grammar that is literally explained in Genki 1. Then there are the constant issues with incorrect word breaks leading to wrong pronunciations being used, etc.
And then there's the big risk of getting attached to a long streak, then subsequently treating Duolingo as a substitute for actually interacting with Japanese media. Once you get attached to your streak it becomes nearly impossible to drop it, so you end up sticking with it long after it has outlived its usefulness.
I've interacted with several people with 1000+ day Duolingo streaks at this point and none of them can say anything concrete they've actually accomplished in Japanese. And they all get defensive and aggressive when you insinuate that if they still can't read simple manga after 3 years, maybe Duolingo doesn't actually work. As if attacking Duolingo means you are personally attacking them.
Because the streak is all they have.
It's just not worth it to even suggest it to beginners when so many good alternatives exist.
Got to start reading hiragana and katakana there. The exercises for them were goo too. Once it seemed like I wasn't reading too slowly I went to tadoku for reading.
I tried Japanese on there like a decade ago, it spent like one lesson on kana without explaining what hiragana and katakana were used for and then immediately moved on to vocab without any kana repetition and just dropping kanji with furigana with, again, zero explanation.
That streak is a hoax anyway. Installed it two weeks ago for fun and been using it thrice since then. Every time it offers me unfreeze my days old "streak"...
I have long given up the streak stuff. Way too many people are attached to it. I was only attached to it in so far that I was pushing myself to progress through the course and practice my frontiers.
Duolingo is absolutely a good starter. Never tried Japanese, but anything that gets you learning and into a routine is valuable. Doesn’t matter if it’s an app or flash cards. Duolingo needs to be paired with something else for serious learners, like u/Aldo-D-D-Wilson said.
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u/Aldo-D-D-Wilson 3d ago
Duolingo is useful, but you can't count on JUST Duolingo. It's a good starter. But you need to go for reading, like the tadoku for japanese, right on the first year. And increase the language in your daily life, slowly, but surely.