mobrec

Earlier this year, after 665 continuous days on DuoLingo for Japanese I realized that I wasn’t learning the language, I was just being asked to parrot phrases over and over without any explanation of the grammar, word tense, negation. Yes, it didn’t provide anything that would actually be useful in constructing sentences or responding to someone speaking to me.

Many of the phrases were absolutely useless (perhaps a product of Duo’s shift from actual instructional people to poorly executed algorithms). For example, I can’t imagine when I would say “We should eat spicy potato chips at the party tonight.” or “We should play with the colorful animals at the cafe.”

The translations themselves were suspect as well. Rather than accepting the nominal meaning of a response, the response was rejected as incorrect because the algorithm thinks that “not really” and “really not” are completely different concepts. Also claiming that “A is next to B” is completely different than “B is next to A”. To add insult to incompetence, Duo recently started prompting for users to signup for some additional AI BS “to learn why your answer was incorrect”. Uh, shouldn’t that be part of teaching?

I really knew that Duo was a waste of time when I spent just 20 minutes with LingoDeer for Japanese. In that time I actually learned the grammar and other important aspects of the language including speaking and reading drills. NO memorization, ALL learning! I am now about 40 days into LingoDeer and I have learned more, useful Japanese than I did in nearly 2 years of Duo.

tl;DR If you are interested in learning Japanese, check out LingoDeer. They frequently have specials that discount the cost of the training and even when they don’t, it is a much better value than Duo. Learn the language with LingoDeer, don’t memorize an expensive, inaccurate phrase book with Duo.