[trophycase]

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.

[barry-cotter]

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.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/abo...

[titanix2]

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.

[MegaLeon]

Bit off-topic, what what did you find is working well for you?