I don’t self-identify as an otaku, but I’ve watched some weeks or months of anime in total over the years. And I have made the occasional attempt at learning at least a bit of Japanese. But it has never gone beyond a few words and phrases. And I have learned the hiragana several times and forgotten them again (although it does get easier to learn them for each time).
Unlike some approaches, Duolingo teaches the hiragana right away. And if you’ve not learned them before, you should probably stop right there and practice them every day until you can read them without help, even if slowly. Because when you move on to kanji (the Chinese-like characters), they are never spelled out in Latin alphabet, only in hiragana. And soon enough you get started on real words, which are spelled either in hiragana or katakana or kanji or some combination of kanji and hiragana. Soon enough you get into sentences, and in true Japanese style these are written without spaces. If the individual hiragana don’t leap out at you at that point, you will learn the true meaning of the phrase “wall of text”. Unlike its spoken form, written Japanese is quite compact. Some punctuation has been introduced, but mostly you just look at long strings of kanji and hiragana, with the occasional word in katakana.
Speaking of katakana, the first of them are taught immediately after hiragana. This is a problem if you are not super familiar with hiragana, because for the most part they symbolize the same sounds. So you have two different signs for “i” for instance. (You have that in English too: I and i. But the usage is very different in Japanese, as katakana is mostly used for foreign or technical words, although it CAN be used for emphasis. In the course katakana have so far only been used for foreign names, and are taught sparsely and in between kanji. I think that is a good idea, but I would actually teach the first kanji before katakana, to make sure there is a long gap between learning them. Otherwise it might be too easy to mix them up in our heads. I am happy that I have been through hiragana several times before so I recognize them as hiragana on sight, regardless of whether I instantly recognize which hiragana.
OK, after a few days I can recognize each hiragana too, although I sometimes struggle with ha / ho / ma especially. I need to take a second look at those.
Since I had learned hiragana before, I forged ahead faster than I normally would do for such a difficult language. I have completed 11 bubbles so far, down to and including Time 3. But I really feel the crunch now. Most exercises are “wall of text” now, either translating one such compact string or making one from parts. There are still scattered exercises of matching hiragana or katakana to normal Latin letters (or rather syllables, usually at two letters each and sometimes three). Those matching exercises are just brief respites, though, and then there’s another compact string of weird squiggles again. I have to say, it feels daunting. But when I concentrate, those walls of text break down into familiar parts and I can translate them into English and put them back together in the right order (which is usually not at all the same as they appear in Japanese). Almost miraculously, so it seems to me, I usually get them right. Almost all the time actually. But each time I get a new one, it doesn’t feel like that at all.
Now about the change they made to Android where you only have timed exercises. That may work great for a language you already know pretty well, but when you need to pick apart a long string of runes and sigils and you don’t even know where the words begin and end until you have stared at them a while, the last thing you want is a timer that runs out while you are halfway through the process. It is a particularly terrible combination. By coincidence or providence I happened to purchase an iPad just before all this (well, actually I bought it because I was not sure when Japanese would come to Android), and it still has the old exercises, long may it last. If any of your loved ones is studying Japanese on Duolingo and only has an Android device, it may be time to brush up on your self defense skills before you walk in on them. There is a thin line between just right and maddeningly difficult, and a small distraction can be enough to make the difference.