I started DuoLingo Japanese several years ago but didn’t have a very long streak of consecutive days. I decided to try to spend 5 to 10 minutes in the morning, instead of rushing to get it in at night before midnight.
Since this change, it’s been easier to practice my Japanese consistently. That being said, I only learned about 500 to 600 vocabulary words. I seem to learn enough to pass a unit, but then I am not good at retaining this knowledge.
Still, there is no rush. I would like to visit Japan again with my family but we have to plans at the present. But when I finally do get there, I’d like to be able to find my way around more easily than when I went in 1992 not speaking much Japanese at all.
I am half-Japanese and my mother took Japanese classes after school growing up. My Japanese grandparents immigrated to the United States before WWII and they never really learned English. My mom spoke a version of Japanese that was kind of stuck during the time period from when my grandparents left Japan, but she could still converse in Japanese.
My goal is to be able to order in restaurants and find my way around as a tourist. I may need several more years to hit this goal!
How about you? Is anyone else learning a language using DuoLingo? How do you like it? I find that the free version works best for me — when I run out of hearts by making too many mistakes it’s time to stop. My retention is better when I am forced to go over my mistakes day after day until I finally pass the unit.
p.s. Related posts:
Learning Japanese Through Games
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FREE Immersive History Game about WWII Japanese Americans
Sumo Joe at the Japanese American National Museum
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Japanese Internment Books for Kids & My Family’s Story
Poetry for Kids: Haiku using Japanese Art
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I love duolingo and have an 1,188 day streak 🙂
I haven’t tried Japanese though. I tried Arabic and found it really confusing and hard. I use it to keep up Spanish, French, and German, and I’m trying Welsh with my kids as a “secret” language. Sometimes I do Russian but my Russian isn’t very good and it’s much more challenging. But the app makes language study so much easier, and I love that it is accessible to everyone for free.
I do kind of wish you could jump to any level for languages that you speak well – it will catch me for relatively minor grammatical errors and because of those I have to stick with easier vocabulary. It seems like there should be a way to separate out grammar issues from vocabulary.