[supriyo-biswas]

I agree with your assessment that lessons have been watered down. I’ve been taking the Japanese course and it’s endless variations of “Rice and water please” continuing for multiple lessons, with nary a new word or two thrown in from time to time.

[iainmerrick]

Hmm, I’ve been studying Japanese on Duolingo for a few weeks now, and that doesn’t match my experience at all -- plenty of rice and water, yes, but also fairly complex (though formulaic) sentences like “it’s 10:30 right now”, “how many windows are in the room?”, “she has three older sisters”, early in the second lesson block. The gamification is incredibly heavy-handed but I must admit it’s succeeding in getting me to use it a couple of times a day.

Edit to add: there’s a ton of repetition, if that’s what you mean, but that’s how you learn! Spaced repetition.

My main complaint is that it doesn’t seem to take complexity into account at all in the timed review sessions. You’ll get exactly the same amount of time for basic words like “dog”, “cat”, “red”, “blue” as for long sentences like “Professor Tanaka speaks English and Japanese”.

[supriyo-biswas]

Interesting, what level are you currently at and what’s the Japanese proficiency you selected when signing up? I’m currently at Intro to Japanese, unit 3 and even though it’s titled “talk about countries and ask for directions” I still mostly get “rice and water please” most of the time.

[iainmerrick]

I’ve finished “Intro to Japanese” (8 units) and started “Japanese Foundations I” (unit 1/20), since joining at the start of the year. I didn’t know any Japanese beyond a few words in Romaji (types of sushi, etc).

It sounds like their app is different on each OS for historical reasons. On iOS at least, some very important content is oddly hidden away. The overview sections in each lesson block are well worth reading, and hiragana and katakana are on another tab so it’s easy to forget about them.