The past few months I have studied almost exclusively Japanese, because that was the language I wanted to learn in the first place, and the others were really just to test out Duolingo. (It passed the test, obviously.) And Japanese really needs a good learning tool. It is hard. It is really, really hard.
If you want to quickly see how hard Japanese is without learning it, try taking a paragraph of a Japanese online newspaper and run it through Google Translate. Over the last months, the artificial intelligence of Google has become ever more powerful. It used to just print broken gibberish, often with random Japanese characters still in it, but now it looks mostly like complete sentences with the right parts in the right places. Except after reading it, you will still not know what it tried to say, likely as not. Or at least you need to be pretty creative. Like this random example:
In the United States, there is a culture that selects a movie to become “a medicine that sinks a mind” from the standpoint of psychiatry. On the other hand, even though it is evaluated as “masterpiece”, there are also movies that become psychiatrically “poison to sink”.
Perhaps Japanese just think weirdly, but somehow people who actually understand Japanese are able to translate to English and actually make perfect sense, sometimes even get across jokes or subtle nuances. At the current speed, I should be able to do this in a couple decades. ^_^
I typically do 20 points (two sets of exercises) per day, which is what I need to continue my “streak” on standard learning speed. (You can choose easier or harder streaks.) Generally if I manage to finish the first exercise without any errors or with only “not really” errors like pressing the wrong word by accident, I learn a new set of words or grammatical feature as the second exercise. If I make errors because I genuinely don’t remember or understand, then I choose repetition for the second exercise as well.
But the truth is that even when I get everything right, it is very rare that the exercise is easy. In French, exercises were generally easy when I got them right. In Japanese, they are still hard, and I am uncertain whether I was right until I get the answer. (This is mainly true for translating sentences, especially into Japanese. Matching sounds to signs is generally easy for me, but at this stage you don’t get a whole set with just those.)
I have worked through 23 topics and they are all “gold” (meaning there is no urgent need to repeat them) and have 16 still ahead of me. And I still feel like a toddler. I think it is safe to say that a “Japanese II” course would be very warmly received. Not sure if I will be able to understand simple texts if I finish the course or whether I will need to move on to some other form of learning, we’ll see if we get there.