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How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

making.duolingo.com

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Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#61

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

garou wrote: post #48
_hao wrote: post #46

From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.

The usefulness of a language depends if you are going to use. I got your point, China is HUGE and extremely important at the moment and future. But at the same time japanese can be seen as very useful because: - its a very important ally of the USA; - introduce you to the ideographic writing system; - be very similar to korean grammar (and particle system).

Another thing with Chinese is that even though the writing system is universal the dialects very so much that someone from Hong Kong might not be able to understand someone from Beijing, Shenzhen, or Shanghai(not familiar with what dialects are spoken where). That said they're all fairly similar and can be picked up more easily once you already know one.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#62

Post by Naritai »

panglott wrote: post #58

"To show just how complex this can get, let’s take a simple English phrase – “I love you” – and dissect the many ways in which it can be said in Japanese. Spoiler alert: it’s not such a simple phrase in Japanese. One of our course contributors, Sho, estimated and found that there can actually be as many as 248,026 ways to say “I love you” in Japanese!" These kind statistics are a kind of lie in themselves. You can sa…

This seems like a modern version of the old claim "Inuit have 100+ words for snow". I've found that's true for most of the claims of "X language has Y words for concept Z!!!" Inevitably it comes down to one of two things: -language X has a slightly different concept of 'word' than English does (such as allowing for conjugations to refer to past or future states) -The english word is question has a variety of context specific meanings or applications (such as 'love'), and each one of those meanings, even though their context-specific meaning would never be misinterpreted by an english speaker, has a different word in language X.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#63

Post by anomie31 »

apricot13 wrote: post #5
sapphire_tomb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just coming here to ask the very same thing!

Its only available on ios at the moment https://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/ja/en/status hideki Japanese beta course available on iOS! 15 hours ago We are thrilled to announce that our Japanese course is now available on iOS. It's coming to Android in a few weeks, and web will be next! Find more details at https://www.duolingo.com/comment/22676285 http://making.duolingo.com/how-we-invented-a-new-way-to-teac... htt…

Any simple reason why it's delayed for Android? Do the devs prefer the ios development environment? Do they have more iphones to test on? Are iphone users prioritized because they have a higher median income?

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#64

Post by empath75 »

Grue3 wrote: post #42
shawnps wrote: post #14

I started learning Japanese around 8 years ago, and I've never been a fan of saying it's "the most difficult language to learn." It's like learning anything else, if you enjoy learning it and are motivated enough, you'll get better. Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway…

It is worth saying it's an extremely difficult language to learn because most people are not prepared for what awaits them even if they learned another language before . Anyone can pick up how to read kana in a week or so, so it's easy to assume that you're almost there, and you'll be reading manga or whatever in no time. But it's just the beginning. The language is completely different. You must commit a huge amount…

The katakana words are often English, but it still takes some time to realize that to-re is 'toilet'

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#65

Post by TACIXAT »

shawnps wrote: post #27
OriginalPenguin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that it's like learning anything else. If you put the time in and are motivated and go about it the right way you can learn it. But it's still "the most difficult language to learn". So it's worth taking that difficulty into account. For example one can learn Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in around the same amount of time it would take to learn Japanese.

What about Chinese? As someone who's learning Japanese already, Chinese looks more difficult to me. To me it seems very subjective, some people will be better at learning one language vs. another.

Tones are tricky in Chinese, on the other hand, there is no conjugation which I really appreciate.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#66

Post by stordoff »

shawnps wrote: post #25
creshal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes." That makes speaking the language easier, but it makes understanding sentences harder in the beginning, because you get a bucket of word soup dumped on your head and have to figure out what is supposed to go whe…

That's a good point. I can imagine it might be difficult for someone new to Japanese to understand who is the subject of the sentence, when pronouns are dropped so frequently.

It's part of the language I enjoy (I find myself dropping pronouns, usually "I", in written English anyway, so it feels oddly natural), but dropping "watashi wa"/"anata wa" even in something as simple as "I am "/"You are " (both can be said as " desu"> definitely makes it more difficult to get started. I've found it to be more or less a non-issue once I got used to picking up on the context clues, but there's no easy/quick way to get there other than listening to a lot of the language.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#67

Post by TACIXAT »

baby wrote: post #47
_hao wrote: post #46

From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.

I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :( Currently my favorite app is "Decipher Chinese". I read one story a day, save words I want to remember and get quizzed on them periodically.

I have Du Chinese and I like it a little more than Decipher. I'm always excited when I get a notification for a newbie or elementary lesson. Chinese Skill and Hello Chinese are lesson quiz format and pretty interchangeable. Line Dictionary is cool cause you can draw in it. I also have Pleco for the Outliers dictionary which shows etymology, but it's still in development. HSK Magic is another one that looks decent, flash card style learning.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#68

Post by _hao »

baby wrote: post #47
_hao wrote: post #46

From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.

I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :( Currently my favorite app is "Decipher Chinese". I read one story a day, save words I want to remember and get quizzed on them periodically.

The closest thing I've found to Duolingo for Chinese is an app called ChineseSkill (Android and iOS). It's pretty good for the most part. My learning stack so to speak consists of HSK textbooks, Skritter, ChineseSkill and recently I've added ClozeMaster. This is all for Mandarin btw.

Re: How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

#69

Post by LSCanaan »

rootsudo wrote: post #21

I learned hiragana and katakana using the "Kanji Study" app by Chase Colburn. On the google app store. I don't know the guy, but the app is simply amazing. Repetion, through fun methods, I learned hiragana as I rode the Tokyo metro and katakana too. (It also helped that everywhere was both Kanas) Since we're all talking about how we all picked up some Japanese, I thought I'd throw it out there. I normally never donat…

Anything similar on iOS you'd mind to recommend?
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