There are features I have seen on Duolingo that would be particularly welcome for Japanese. One is the “turtle speed” for the spoken sample, where a native speaker is saying the words exaggeratedly slowly and distinctly. French has this, for instance, and it has been very useful especially at the start. Japanese is the fastest spoken of the major languages, and the speech samples in Duolingo certainly don’t slow down for newbies, at least after the first minutes.
One option that was available in the Android version from the start was the option to go directly to the discussion board after doing a single sentence translation. Students would ask why a phrase was worded this particular way, or whether it could also be translated in a certain way, and more experienced learners or even native speakers would explain. Now that we only have 1-minute stopwatch for general practice, this option fell by the wayside, although it is still available when you practice a particular bubble and most importantly when learning a new bubble (topic). Unfortunately this feature is missing in the iPad version, which is the one which still has non-timed general practice. I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too, as you say in English! (The Norwegian phrase is “i pose og sekk” – in bag and sack, by the way. Which is more applicable here, because you could get in bag and sack if the giver was generous enough.)
A third gripe is, as I mentioned before, the absence of grammar. The other courses have simple grammar lessons in the web version, at the point where a new grammatical feature is introduced. But Japanese does not have a web version; it is announced to arrive “much later”.
Despite these complaints, Duolingo is still the most fun, engaging and effective way I have tried to learn Japanese. I realize it is somewhat unfair that I have tried before with Memrise and Anki, a software course that only used Latin alphabet, and various friendly and helpful websites. I guess every time you try to walk the same path, it gets a little easier. But to me, Duolingo is just more fun, even when it is hard. I know I can always choose my own balance between repetition and learning more, and in each case still experience a sense of progress (as well as racking up points to increase my levels and reach my daily goal). Duolingo is pretty good at choosing what to practice, but if there is something I particularly feel I need to get better at, I can choose that topic manually and still get my points. But most of all, I just seem to learn faster this time around.
There are still a couple things you can do that will really mess up your learning, but I will cover that in my next journal entry.