Since last I wrote, the Duolingo app has gone back to saving up the wrong answers for repeat at the end of the session instead of immediately, so I guess it was only a test. Perhaps it was not even rolled out to all the students. They do this from time to time, try new features and then remove them when they don’t work better. Same as they did with the timed-only exercises.
I am still studying Japanese. Trying to do only 20 points a day, as I did with French, is clearly not enough. Most days it will barely be enough to repeat what I have already learned. My practice is like this: I don’t move on to learn something new unless I have got a full 10-point lesson right or at least almost right (more than 90% at least). Actually scientists seem to disagree on whether 80% or 90% is the ideal rate: If you do better, repetition was probably not necessary; if you do worse, you should probably have repeated it before. But it is supposed to be in that range. Well, 20 points a day is usually just barely enough to achieve this, so days go by without learning anything new. That is OK and to be expected, since I started out doing well above 20 points a day for the first weeks. If I want to keep making progress, I need to put in more time. But I am not in the zone where I am falling more and more behind either, because I restrained myself from zooming too fast forward.
And it is still fun, even when it can be challenging. For example today, I stopped at the Japanese phrase “わたしはかのじょのおとうとです” (watashi wa kanojo no otouto desu). I know that I am supposed to translate it “I am her younger brother”. But it could actually mean a couple different things that we have not learned. Kanojo can also mean girlfriend (and this is how it is usually used in anime). In Japanese it is much less common to use personal pronouns at all: If it is not clear from the context who you are talking about, you would use their name or title (with appropriate honorifics) rather than a pronoun. I am not sure how this is practiced in dialects, but that’s the party line. So Duolingo is here actually using the word kanojo in order to make the sentence more similar to English, but in practice that could cause confusion. The sentence could also translate as “I am your girlfriend’s younger brother” for instance, which could become quite embarrassing.
Anyway, Japanese is really difficult, like Hebrew level difficult or worse, if you are not already familiar with it. Even looking at a familiar word I can’t always know how to pronounce it, because some of the words are written using kanji (Chinese style ideograms) which we have not yet repeated often enough for me to remember how to pronounce them. Pronunciation and understanding are trained separately, so I can translate some sentences I can’t pronounce, or (more rarely) the other way around. Because of my hyperlexia I actually learn understanding easier than pronunciation. It is the same in English: I not only understand but write many English words that I don’t know exactly how to pronounce. But at least I am pretty close, any English-speaker should be able to guess what I try to say. In Japanese, I am sometimes completely blank. I can see what it means but can’t remember even vaguely how to pronounce it. Hopefully that will pass with more practice. The only limit to how much practice I can get is my lifespan (or that of Duolingo, whichever ends first) – and my patience. At the time of writing, neither of them has run out, long may it last.