Thanks to a happenstance twitter conversation, I have learned of Duolingo, a language teaching program for (I assume) primary English speakers who want to learn a different language. Despite the website, there is in fact support for Japanese. The program presents simple little problems with various little aides to help you build familiarity with the language. It’s apparently been around on iPhone for a while, but it recently became compatible with Android. As someone who uses the Android emulator Nox, I can verify it works on that as well. It is also free with the occasional ad at the end of an instruction. Throwing money to the devs directly scores you no ads.
Japanese is something I actually took a course on over ten years ago but it didn’t really work out because I’m a bad student. Duolingo seems like a good way to get started again and it actually has a ‘groups’ function so that like-minded individuals can learn the language together. It tracks stats and whatnot and encourages learning with others which generally makes learning easier.
And here we get to the point of this thread, I am interested in starting a Japanese learning group with the fine folks here at LPZ via Duolingo. Since it is free and is available on basically all common mobile platforms if you have an interest in learning the good ol’ Nihongo, then please show your interest so that we can help one another embetter ourselves.
Edit: Well, by virtue of two votes, we have a name. Join code is: 92KE6G
If your handle there is different than here, please say so here so I know who is who.
Definitely interested. Similar to you I tried taking Japanese as an extracurricular in high school but it didn’t take. More than willing to give it another shot!
I should go for some review as well - it’s been ages since I did anything serious with Japanese, and while I can read most of the time as long as it’s simple kanji and kana, there’s no way I’d be able to write anything at this point by hand.
I studied two years of JP in high school and have just barely been maintaining my knowledge through light consumption of untranslated media and a friend who’s fluent. I’ve wanted to buckle down on kanji studying forever but I’ve never had a good enough phone for Wanikani or similar apps.
I haven’t tried out Duolingo’s Japanese myself but thought I’d bring it to the threads attention that there are apparently some flaws in their course? I unfortunately don’t have a handy writeup or anything on-hand as I just saw it being lightly discussed on Twitter some weeks ago by some JP speakers I follow, but I searched around a bit and there are some discussion threads on their forums about it. I don’t think it’s anything completely deal-breaking but I think it’s something worth being aware of. The most consistent problem I found glancing at the forum seems to be incorrect kanji readings, so perhaps supplementing with a kanji app would be a good idea?
