Ever since Duolingo came out, Japanese has been the most requested language. But technical problems made it much harder to implement than European languages, which were prioritized first. Some time ago, as mentioned on this blog, Hebrew was released, written entirely in a non-Latin script from right to left. Still, this pales against Japanese with no alphabet as such but two syllabic scripts and one iconographic script with over 1000 icons. Japanese is also extremely context-based, where the same short phrase or sentence could have dramatically different meanings depending on the sentences that surround it. This is a problem when your main method of teaching is short sentences without context.
On May 18, though, Japanese was released for the ios operating system (Apple phones and tablets). Rather than at least a modicum of gratitude, the response was largely an overwhelming condemnation for not releasing it simultaneously on the Web and the Android app. You’d think someone would be happy to let the rich and fashion-conscious be the guinea pigs. However, around the start of June, Japanese was gradually rolled out to Android as well. I first found it on my Samsung Note 2, which is fairly old by today’s standards, but it worked nicely. It is now universally available on Android devices. If you don’t find it, update your app in the Play Store.
While I don’t self-identify as an otaku, I do watch anime pretty much every week (legally, on Crunchyroll.com) and I have been hoping for Japanese on Duolingo since I learned about Duolingo. So naturally I am putting all other languages aside to learn Japanese. I used to do 20 points a day (two 5-minute sessions) of either French or Swahili, some days both. Now I typically do 20 points in the day and another 20-30 points before bedtime, which is the recommended time to learn language for some reason. Science shows that you learn better if you sleep right afterwards, perhaps because you dream about it? Not that I remember doing that.
I breezed through hiragana, which I have learned before (repeatedly, as I forget them after some months). I was a bit dismayed to see that they immediately after introduced katakana, the less used syllabic script. (The two are not interchangeable in practice, although Japanese will be able to read a text easily in either of them. Katakana is mostly used for foreign words, also for scientific terms and for emphasis (somewhat like we use italics, although it is a lot more different than italics, more like the difference between upper and lower case letters, or between typeface and cursive handwriting.) My concern was that by introducing them immediately after each other, people would mix them up unnecessarily. If you waited a couple months the brain would find it much easier to archive them separately. I would in fact recommend introducing kanji – the Chinese icon script that has been adapted to Japanese – before katakana.
Not to worry: After enough katakana to spell a couple names, the app started on kanji. Interestingly, it does not seem to start with the most common necessarily, but rather the ones that are used in common introductions, like the two kanji that make up Nihon (Japan) and the three that between them make up gakusei (student) and sensei (teacher). Normally you would start with kanji that are routinely used on their own, like the kanji for “day”, then later show how to combine kanji. In reality, of course, most Japanese words written in kanji are combinations of two kanji. If you had to learn a separate kanji for each Japanese word, you would not get far with 1000 kanji, which is approximately what kids learn in public school over there. (Duolingo will not teach all of those, I am not sure how many but I seem to remember reading 80. That seems a bit low. Hopefully I shall live to tell you more.)
So far, so fun!