@japaneselanguage On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being great and 1 being horrible, how good is Duolingo for learning Japanese?

  • setsubyou@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe 1.5?

    It’s not that it’s completely useless, but it’s not designed as a learning tool. It’s a game designed to keep you engaged. While it’s possible to pick up some things from Duolingo, what it actually rewards with streaks and leaderboard positions and so on isn’t learning, but just engaging with the app. It’s pretty easy to fall into a trap where it keeps telling you that you’re doing well, but you’re not actually making progress, because demonstrating progress is completely irrelevant for getting rewarded. And on top of that it teaches some things that are just outright wrong, it even gets kanji readings wrong.