I quit Duolingo for Japanese because it was super slow and boring. I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites and started reading native material/talking to natives.
Currently going through KKLC so focusing on kanji/vocab... I passed the JLPT N5 (admittedly so easy it's useless as a certificaiton) with six months of studying from scratch, and I approximately N4 level now (~1 year in).
I know everyone has different goals and timelines, but 2 years of Duolingo feels like it covers what you can learn in <4 months by yourself.
Sure. And sorry if I sounded rough in my comment... if you're happy with Duolingo it's fine. I put in an hour every day towards Japanese (with a full time job + life on top) so I know I'm in a privileged position when it comes to language learning.
I used the following:
- Genki I, II
The classic Japanese textbooks. They're pretty good and have tons of exercises. Do the exercises!
Alternative guide written by one guy. Very good as reference or quick learning. Used it to review Genki material.
- Japanese: The Manga Way
I thought this would be stupid but in some ways I liked it more than the other resources. Every chapter goes through grammar/expressions and it uses real manga examples. Vocab is translated for you. Not necessary with the other two resources but if you like manga or want something different, it's fun.
Long (20+ mins) lectures on grammar with a lot of examples. Goes on tangents often and some videos are too long but a great source of vocab, native expressions, etc.
You've probably heard of this. I currently use it for kanji but you can use it for whatever I prefer making my own flashcards but there's pre-made decks for vocab from Genki, Tae Kim, grammar etc. I'd link to some but they also include links to pirated PDFs so don't want to get the mods mad at me.
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With all of that said, the most helpful thing for me has been reading native content in Chrome with this extension -> https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ if you don't read, write, etc. you will not retain stuff. You will start out not understanding anything but slowly you will start reading without even translating to English.
You will hit a wall with vocab without kanji study but you should be good to go for some time with this.
Japanese conforms extremely poorly to the duolingo format. As someone who is also learning Japanese, I'm very surprised you've stuck with Duolingo this long. My experience was that it explained nothing. No explanation of particles, the different between hiragana and katakana, no other grammar explanations, etc.
How useful is explicitly learning about the difference in use of hiragana and katakana, really? As far as I’m aware the research on language learning is pretty clear on teaching grammar; teaching it explicitly is no more effective than teaching implicitly. This example is right, that one isn’t is how we learn to speak our native tongues and we faultlessly follow rules we can’t teach all the time, e.g. adjective order in English is opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose.
Do you have a link to a paper or two supporting that claim?
Sure as children we learned our natives language by hearing it for years but the point is you can't magically have ten years of everyday language input when learning a foreign language. So then as adult it is way more efficient to learn the underlying rules. If there really was a more efficient method universities would have ditched their curricula for it. But from my experiences they don't and they don't recommend Duolingo either.
Two years ago I had zero knowledge of the language, today I know all hiragana syllables, half of the katakana and a few kanji. I also know some basic vocabulary.
Ok, it's interesting because I also learned Japanese (MA graduate). In comparison, it took me a few days for learning hiragana/katakana plus few weeks more to read them a reasonable speed. Two years before that I've learned about 70 kanji with kunyomi in three weeks during high school. That part was done also with Wikipedia-sensei. Then I actually started learning the language at university.
So, if after two years of using Duolingo you cannot read all the katakana and cannot make a sentence more complex then xxx ha yyy desu it just totally prove how bad the application is. And what's even more damageable is that user think they are making progress and then do not focus on real, useful material.
I quit Duolingo for Japanese because it was super slow and boring. I went through a few beginner grammar books/websites and started reading native material/talking to natives.
Currently going through KKLC so focusing on kanji/vocab... I passed the JLPT N5 (admittedly so easy it's useless as a certificaiton) with six months of studying from scratch, and I approximately N4 level now (~1 year in).
I know everyone has different goals and timelines, but 2 years of Duolingo feels like it covers what you can learn in <4 months by yourself.