Duolingo

[swan_tower]

On the recommendation of several friends, I recently started using Duolingo to study Japanese. The tldr; of my reaction is that Duolingo seems like a great way to practice a language — I’ve been doing at least small amounts of Japanese daily for over two months now, which is more than I’ve managed for years — and an absolutely abysmal way to learn a language.

I don’t know if that’s just because I’m doing Japanese, which, as a non-Indo-European language with a super-complicated writing system, is especially heinous. But I doubt there’s any massive difference with, say, Spanish, unless the format of the lessons is totally different, because Duolingo makes precisely zero attempt to explain anything to the user. (Including how to use the program. Maybe that would be different if I were accessing it via a web browser, but the phone app doesn’t even have a “here’s how Duolingo works” how-to.)

And yes: immersion is a way to learn a language. But immersion requires substantial commitment; five minutes a day with a phone app ain’t gonna get you there. The Japanese lessons do not tell you that there are hiragana, katakana, and kanji, and that kanji can be pronounced multiple different ways. They don’t tell you about -te forms or the difference between polite and plain speech (and they just start randomly salting the latter in eventually, so that somebody not already familiar with that concept will be looking in vain for their です option). They tell you nothing: they just fling sentences at you and assume you’ll figure it out by trial and error.

[EDITED TO ADD: Okay, so it turns out there are profound differences between the mobile app and the website. As in, the website provides short lessons, which are entirely missing from the app. And the website also gives you a way to provide feedback on a sentence or its translation, if you think there’s an error. Which doesn’t remove the problems I discuss below; those things should have been caught before this ever went live. And I am utterly croggled that the app not only doesn’t include more functionality, but doesn’t make it clear to you that there is more functionality available, because in these days of “let’s make everything mobile,” in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I assume that what I’m getting on my phone is what I’d get in my browser. But my overall impression of Duolingo is improved somewhat by knowing that lessons are available if you look in the right place, and that they do have a method of letting you go “omgwtfbbq this is wrong.” Back to the post now.]

But that isn’t what really grates my cheese. No, I have massive issue with the fact that whoever coded this appears to have no fucking clue how Japanese works.

I don’t mean the sentences are ungrammatical — though there are places where I take issue with their translations, especially when they translate one Japanese word with variant English ones, or vice versa, in ways that muddy the distinctions between the words they’re teaching you. No, this has to do with the way the app works, and the way Japanese works, and the flat-out wrong way those two things interface sometimes.

Three pieces of context, for those who aren’t already familiar: first, many of the Duolingo questions operate by giving you a sentence in either English or Japanese, and then asking you to assemble the translation from a set of pre-determined blocks. For example, I might have to select [My] [older] [brother] [is] [tall] to translate the sentence 私の兄はせが高いです. Second, as you can see from my Japanese there, the language does not natively have spaces between words; in fact, determining where to put spaces is not simple, and people don’t agree on how best to do it. And third, for Reasons, the hiragana character は is normally pronounced “ha,” but when it’s being used as a particle — a piece of grammatical equipment — it’s “wa” instead.

So that “there’s no clear system for where to break words” thing? There might not be a right way to do it . . . but boy fucking howdy are there wrong ways.

Early on in using the app, I hit an English sentence I think was something like “The book is here” — 本はここにあります, or in romaji, hon wa koko ni arimasu. Note the は there. So I start assembling the blocks of Japanese, only I can’t find ここ among my options.

Because the blocks it’s offering me are [本] [はこ] [こ] [に] [あり] [ます].

I can accept those last two, because there is (faint) merit in splitting a verb ending off from the verb stem, even if every romanization system I’ve ever seen would write that as “arimasu” rather than “ari masu.” But the beginning of that sentence is flat-out wrong. The app helpfully plays the sound for what you’re selecting, and it read out “hon” followed by “hako” followed by “ko.”

Hako means “box.”

They split the word for “here” in the middle and slapped the particle on the first half of it, turning what should have been “wa koko” into “hako ko.” And this is not the only time they’ve done crap like that. I hit one sentence in a later lesson that used the word 郵便局 (“post office”), only it was written in hiragana, ゆうびんきょく. All well and good — right up until the point where they offered me blocks saying [ゆうびんき] [ょくに行きました]. You can’t do that. Not only does it literally split the word for “post office” in half, it does so in a manner that amounts to [postof] [ficeIwentto]. That ょ can’t start a word, not when it’s shrunk down like that; the whole reason it’s shrunk down is to show that it modifies the preceding character, き. On its own, that one is “ki,” and the other is “yo.” Together, they’re not “kiyo,” they’re “kyo.” Which is a meaningfully different sound — as in you can literally change the meaning of a word by swapping one for the other.

There are lower-grade problems like this all over the Japanese lessons. Because kanji can have multiple pronunciations, 中 can be pronounced both “naka” and “chuu” (among other options) — but when the app asks you to match characters to their pronunciations, the one it provides you is “chuu,” while the voice cheerfully reads out “naka.” Yeah, ’cause that’s not going to confuse the hell out of someone who hasn’t already mastered hiragana and learned about the difference between kun’yomi and on’yomi. If I assemble the phrase for “man” in a sentence, the audio it gives me for 男の人 is “otoko no jin” instead of “otoko no hito” — the exact opposite of the 中 problem, because “naka” is the pronunciation you generally use when that character is on its own, but “jin” is the one you use in a compound word (like “gaijin”). When you put a number with a counter, you get audio like “ichi hon” instead of “ippon,” because that’s how those parts are pronounced separately, and the app doesn’t take into account the fact that together they undergo a sound change.

. . . except it does. That’s what’s so infuriating. Duolingo does a good job of hitting the same material from all the angles; it will give me English and ask me to assemble the Japanese, or the Japanese and ask me to assemble the English, or I’ll have to do listening comprehension and provide either the transcription or the translation. And when what it’s giving me is the Japanese sentence in full, it’s correct. It will say “otoko no hito” rather than “otoko no jin,” and “ippon” instead of “ichi hon.” So they have that audio. But whoever put the Japanese lessons together utterly failed to notice that, oh hey, they kept giving us wrong things whenever they break it up. (A fact that manifests in a small, mildly hilarious way any time you need to put together a negative polite verb, because the final -n is its own block, and the audio pronounces it with the kind of rising intonation you’d use when you’re asking a question — not the way you’d pronounce it as a normal verb ending.)

So basically, I find Duolingo pretty good for studying Japanese because I already know the language. I’m learning new vocabulary and getting lots of practice in things like word order, which is a thing I never really internalized very well — i.e. when you have a complex sentence, what bits of it should go before what other bits. But if you’re trying to learn from it, what it’s providing ranges from “unhelpful” to “straight-up wrong.”

I’ve sent in feedback (once I figured out how to do that; see above re: the app isn’t even helpful in telling you how to use the app), so maybe it’ll be fixed. Right now there’s only one basic Japanese course, and I’ve gone through the first level of all the lessons, so now it’s just rinse and repeat until I internalize some of this stuff. But dear god: if they want to continue with this language, they need to get their grammatical and phonetic house in order, because otherwise it’s going to be a trash fire.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[sholio]

I agree with you about Duolingo. I used it for awhile for brushing up on French (I really need to get back to that), and I don't think it's going to be as confusing because the languages are so much more similar, but it definitely assumed a basic understanding of vocabulary and grammar -- which I have, but I wouldn't want to learn a new language from scratch that way. Or at least, I think Duolingo might work well as an auxiliary resource for learning how the language functions in practice, while also using a basic grammar/vocab book and memorizing a bunch of stuff from that and then using Duolingo to practice putting it all together. I don't think I'd want Duolingo to be my sole source on a language I knew nothing about going into it, though.

[swan_tower]

Do the French lessons have comparable errors? Or is it more or less correct, and just functions as a practice app instead of a teaching one?

[twistedchick]

The French and Spanish lessons -- I have done the Spanish and am reasonble at it in writing, need more spoken practice, and I am in the middle of the French -- have two links at the bottom of the exercises.

One is for you to report if the hints are not good or the sample sentence has an error, or if your version of the translation (usually into English) should be accepted. I've gotten several email responses in the past few months from them, saying they will add my translation of some sentence to what is considered acceptable and correct.

The other link is to a discussion of how the particular sentence works, why this word is used instead of that one, and variations.

In these languages, there is also a place you can click, when there are blocks, to write your own words instead of using theirs.

I have also tried to learn Hebrew on Duolingo and it is much more difficult. I think the link to write your own words is missing from the blocks, for one thing. Also, there is no lesson on the Hebrew letters themselves, so it means I have to sight-memorize the letters without necessarily knowing what sounds they make, associate them with the meanings and make sentences -- because there is not always a spoken sentence to accompany them.

I think Duolingo is very varied in how well it teaches a language, based on how the language is put together. They do seem to respond to feedback, though.

[swan_tower]

Is that in the web version? Per a comment below, it sounds like there are major differences between that and the mobile app.

[twistedchick]

Yes -- it is the web version. It has metamorphosed several times since I first started using it a few years ago; it is much more complex and goes to far more depth in terms of skill and understanding than it used to. I buzzed through the older Spanish easily, and am now going through French much more slowly. I should mention that I had four years of Latin and tested out at second-year college level on advanced placement, so I am not coming into it without some knowledge of sentence structures and grammar in European languages. I have also tried several other languages besides the ones mentioned: German (I had 2 years in college, bored silly by it); Italian (which I plan to do along with/after redoing the Spanish); Irish Gaelic (I think it was not well thought out and needs work); and Russian (not even sure now why I stopped it.)

[sholio]

FWIW, I don't remember anything flat-out wrong in the French lessons (somewhat confusing or ambiguous in places, but not actively wrong). But I'm not fluent, so I could easily have missed stuff.

[3rdragon]

I was using Duolingo for French for a while (based on very minimal instruction in junior high) and remember being really frustrated with the way it didn't explain anything. I couldn't figure out the rules for conjugating anything, or how to pick the correct verb from two similar choices. And because the sample set was so small, I couldn't extrapolate from what it was showing me. (At the time, I didn't even know it *had* a web version.)

[starlady]

Ooh, I'd heard the Japanese wasn't great, but this is really bad.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, it's . . . very much a "handle with care" kind of thing. If you know the language already and are using the app for practice, you can filter out the errors and get value out of the rest -- and to be clear, I am finding it valuable! Daily practice for two months straight is nothing to sneeze at, given my track record before now, and I genuinely think they do a good job of hitting the same or similar sentences from all the variant angles of what they give you and what you have to respond with. But "well, it isn't too bad if you know to correct for the hilaribad things they're doing wrong" isn't exactly a great sale pitch, y'know?

[brooksmoses]

That's starting to sound like the (dense, self-published) book I bought to set aside for a time when I really want to deeply understand general relativity -- for which my theory was that figuring out the subtle flaws in the author's understanding of relativity that were leading them to obviously-flawed conclusions would be a very effective exercise.

[swan_tower]

Heh. It's a nice theory . . . but I can see why it isn't your go-to read when you have a spare moment. :-)

[carbonel]

I've been doing Duolingo Hebrew for almost two years, and it's much the same thing. I already had a reasonably solid grounding in Hebrew, so it works for me, but I can't imagine anyone starting from scratch, the way it's presented.

[swan_tower]

See below; apparently you do get lessons if you use the website instead of the mobile app? Though who knows if that's true for all languages.

[carbonel]

I started with the website version and later transitioned to the iPad version, so I'm aware of the fact that there's additional information on the website, but I'm still not sure it would be sufficient for a from-scratch learner. It's mostly just grammatical charts and some minimal information, like "this word is has a masculine ending, but takes a female plural."

In another few units, I'm going to be getting to some new-to-me grammatical stuff, and at that point, I suspect I'll need to have the website charts open while doing the actual modules on the app, and switch back and forth as needed. Or maybe I'll just print it out from my computer. (My printer doesn't support wireless, so I can't print directly from my iPad. Mostly this isn't an issue.)

[sholio]

I started with the website version and later transitioned to the iPad version, so I'm aware of the fact that there's additional information on the website, but I'm still not sure it would be sufficient for a from-scratch learner.

Yeah, I would second this for the French. There are lessons, but from what I remember (and granted it's been a couple of years now) it regularly introduces new words/concepts before the lessons get around to them, and the explanation of grammatical concepts is cursory at best. I think they're going for an immersive learning style where you see it used before they explain how to use it, and focus on demonstration more than explanation, but I tend to learn better the other way around.

[carbonel]

Normally, an immersive experience involves two-way communication. That's what's missing from Duolingo's "immersive" paradigm. I've dipped into the Hebrew forum on Duolingo a couple of times, but it's really not any sort of substitute.

On the other hand, it's free (with nagware), and I've increased my vocabulary considerably, despite the fact that I have zero talent for learning languages, so I'm not complaining too loudly.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, exactly. It's great for what it's good for; the main flaw is the way it gets billed as being great for stuff it actually sucks at.

[conuly]

The web browser does, in fact, have short lessons before practice sessions. Optional lessons, but still, they're there and visible. I don't know why the app doesn't.

[swan_tower]

Ahhhh, interesting. That makes more sense -- except for the part where it loops around to "why the heck is the app so un-user-friendly." (Seriously, nowhere in there can you find explanations of things like levels or crowns or lingots.)

[green_knight]

Thank you for this review; it's extremely useful for me - I have been wanting to take serious steps towards learning Japanese, and now I know where not to go.

[swan_tower]

If you have a grounding in it already, as I said, it's good for practice. But if you're starting from zero, then no, I really can't recommend it.

[green_knight]

I have five words, most hiragana, some katakana, a few Kanji, and very vague concepts of everything else. I could follow your explanations, but would probably not have spotted any of the, of if I had, I would have doubted myself.

[yhlee]

I was warned by several people not to use Duolingo Japanese (I use FluentU, which is great for Japanese and introduces kanji from the beginning but unfortunately quite pricey and has no free version; FluentU Korean is not nearly as good). I'd known it was bad, not but how bad.

My current rotation includes Duolingo Korean, French, German, and Welsh; of these, I have prior familiarity with the first three so I'm not bothered by the lack of lessons on the app; and as for Welsh, well, the odds that I'm going to in person run into a Welsh speaker are pretty nil so I'm just doing it for fun. (I have a source of better free Welsh lessons elsewhere but haven't gone through them yet.)

BTW, I was going to post about this but forgot; I did the "placement test" for Korean because I didn't want to be stuck in "how to read the alphabet" (which I do know already) forever. It's an adaptive test that gets easier if you miss a question and harder if you get one right. I kept guessing right using educated guesses, not because I was actually fluent, and by the end I was yelling at Duolingo in the car while Joe was laughing his ass off at my predicament. For example, "archer" is not a word that I have ever learned in real life! I guessed "archer" correctly partly by eliminating everything else (like particles and terms I knew and things that were verbs rather than nouns) and partly because part of it "looked" like it denoted a profession noun. It bounced me nearly to the end of the course although I'm going back to the earlier parts, but I would expect it to be pure murder for someone who didn't know something about Korean already.

[swan_tower]

Ahhhh, I'd missed that -- I knew you were using Duolingo, and I knew you were practicing Japanese, but I'd merged the two together. You are on the list of people I thought of as recommending Duolingo in a general sense.

And yeah, I placed pretty high via the test; something like two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through the course (which is only a basic course). But I've been working my way through higher levels of the lessons, and they get somewhat more complex as you go, so even on stuff I got marked as "knowing" there's more for me to learn.

[yhlee]

Yeah, I see where the confusion arose! I wouldn't recommend Duolingo in general for learning a language. It suits me for the specific purpose of something I can do on the phone either in the car or while I'm walking my cat, and for Korean/French/German the review is better than nothing at all. For serious language learning I would use other tools. :p I'm currently trying to figure out how the !@#$ to enter Japanese text on my Android phone; that's literally the only thing preventing me from using FluentU Japanese on my phone instead. (The Android app is relatively new; when I started FluentU, they only had it for iOS and the Android app was in development.)

[kurayami_hime]

Google Japanese app, and then make sure that you have the QWERTY layout selected. The other two options are terrible and one of those two will also typically be the default setting because we can't have nice things. Once you have it installed, switching between language input should be tied to the space bar -- either swipe left/right on the space bar or press and hold. The latter was how it worked on my old phone, the former is how it works on the new one. Which is obnoxious when typing one handed because it's easy to accidentally switch input methods (or it is for me at least). I don't know *why* the switching method changed, and I'm too lazy to bother figuring it out.

[yhlee]

Thank you so much! I had installed the Japanese language thingy but couldn't figure out how to actually switch (the instructions I had Googled missed that key bit). I really appreciate the help.

[kurayami_hime]

My pleasure!

[rosefox]

Oh noooooooo that is terrible!

If you're looking for alternatives, I highly recommend the companion sites TextFugu (general Japanese language lessons) and Wanikani (kanji study with spaced repetition). I paid for lifetime subscriptions to both several years ago, so I don't know how much they cost now (and I think their big annual sale just ended), but whatever it is, they're worth it.

I've just started Wanikani again after four years away and am delighted all over again by how easy it makes kanji seem, which is not something you usually hear! They're very big on absurd mnemonics with sensory aspects you'll remember. (One reading of 下, meaning "under" or "below", is した, and the mnemonic is "What's UNDER your shoe? Oh no, you stepped in some した!" I am currently remembering that two readings for 日, "sun" or "day", are にち and じつ by picturing Friedrich Nietzsche diligently practicing jiu jitsu every day in the hot sun, sweat streaming down his face.) The spaced repetition system adapts to you so you study more of what you forget and less of what you remember. There's an unofficial but extremely good app interface for the website. I play it like any other phone game. It's fun.

TextFugu opens by asking you to think about why you want to study Japanese, set up a study space, figure out specific rituals or habits for study (e.g., every day after dinner), and create a logbook where you can write diary entries about your studies (not just what you learned, but how it felt and what was easy or hard). Before they even get into teaching you the language, they want to make sure you're set up to learn happily and effectively. It's an amazing approach that frankly should be the first chapter of any textbook, and it creates a trusting relationship right from the start that feels very personal and supportive. I love it.

[yhlee]

I will caveat that WaniKani only works so-so for me (I too have a lifetime subscription) not because it's a bad system but it's a system that seems to really depend on visual imagery. I kept running into a wall with their system because I can't visualize stuff. But this shouldn't be an issue for most people is my guess.

[rosefox]

Ahhhh, yeah, that's true, it is very much about the visual imagination, though they do sometimes try to make it multisensory.

[juliet]

I've used Duolingo for German (knew fairly well, was way out of practice), Russian (starting from scratch), and Spanish (starting from scratch, but I know French and a little Italian). It was great as a boost for German to get me back to the level where I could start reading children's books as my next step.

I've found it decent for Russian, but I'm very aware that I'm learning it more as a set of puzzles than anything else. 5 minutes a day for 3 or so years, and I would still struggle to put a sentence together all by myself in Russian. However I am starting to get to the point where I could have a bash at genuine-not-language-textbook Russian text, with a dictionary. I suspect that there are many ways that would be superior for learning, and would have been much faster, but none of them would be reasonably accessible/achievable for me at this point in my life so...better than nothing, and nothing is apparently the alternative, so.

Spanish I'm finding much easier going, but it's a Romance language, so moderately recognisable.

I have been very aware of the lack of explanation of grammar/structure/etc. (I only use the app.) But I've also found it quite satisfying to work out the grammar/structure/tense endings and so on, from exposure. Knowing that those things are there (and learning languages where they're fairly regular) was crucial for that, I suspect. And having that sort of brain :)

We seem to be in the same boat, or at least flotilla

[batwrangler]

So very much this:

I have been very aware of the lack of explanation of grammar/structure/etc. (I only use the app.) But I've also found it quite satisfying to work out the grammar/structure/tense endings and so on, from exposure. Knowing that those things are there (and learning languages where they're fairly regular) was crucial for that, I suspect. And having that sort of brain.

Re: We seem to be in the same boat, or at least flotilla

[juliet]

:) and also what you say below about "if it's this or nothing then this is better". I've tried to learn Russian a couple of times before and this has stuck as a practice in a way nothing else did! I have *more* Russian learning this way than I would trying-and-failing-to-actually-do-anything with a 'better' approach.

[batwrangler]

I've been using Duolingo for French and German refreshers (had French in school grades 1 through 8, and German in high school and college), and to learn Spanish and Japanese. I've been able to deduce some of the of the weirdness with the Japanese based on thinking about what I'm doing inside the mobile ap. Thanks for being so thorough about it! I find that the French and German also have some weirdness in that there are things that I know I translate correctly that the app doesn't accept because they vary too much from what it expects but I haven't taken the time to analyze what's going on when it dings me for "wrong" translations that I know are ok. In general, I find having little to no formal grammar is an impediment to learning, but at least I'm gaining vocab and learning to recognize characters? It's much more than I've managed in years of wistfully thinking about regaining my conversational French and German and vaguely desiring to learn additional languages? My goal is just 5 minutes a day per language in the free version, so it's not like I'm investing a lot and it seems more productive than not doing anything which is my functional alternative right now?