Category Archives: Japanese

I’ve noticed this in Japanese, which is the only hard language I study now. The last few months, each of the 10-point exercises start with something easy, and then gradually ramp up with the last questions generally being the hardest. Until then, there was a long time when you could randomly get only beginner exercises or only advanced ones. Now you get a bit of each, each time, even though there is still some random variation in just how hard they get.

This change makes difficult languages less intimidating, as I know I won’t get stuck on an exercise that will take long time and be very frustrating. Even so, I am not really making progress on Japanese, just keeping it warm, while I get distracted by other shiny things. Like Latin, which just came out in beta. But that is a story for another day, if ever.

Yesterday I noticed that there was a short grammar explanation for one of the lessons on the Web version. This is a highly welcome addition for Japanese, which has a grammar that can seem alien to English-speakers. I am not sure how long this has been around, to be honest, as I don’t spend much time doing the web version of such a difficult language. (The app versions are generally easier, so the Web version is mostly for going back to repeat earlier parts that are too easy on a smartphone or tablet.)

The second discovery is almost certainly new, because I noticed it only today on the smartphone, where I practice daily. It was a listening exercise, where you hear a phrase spoken in Japanese and pick the correct text. This type of training has been missing up to now. But even more welcome was the turtle button. It lets you listen to the text more slowly. This has been sorely missed because the default Japanese speech is really fast, faster than some anime voice actors. So it can be really hard to follow longer spoken sentences. Here is hoping that turtle mode might become a general feature, now that they know how to implement it for Japanese.

Today I fired up my Android app and was met with a splash screen about “crowns” and getting five times as much work and five times as much XP. Would I upgrade now? I accidentally clicked yes (or perhaps I just am that stupid).  And suddenly my Japanese skill tree, which had been all gold down to “Activity 2”, had reverted to the “in progress” colors. (These vary from skill to skill, each of which is blue, green or red for reasons I have never found out. I guess it may be related to the type of skill.) On the lower-right corner of each skill circle is now a golden crown with a number in it, usually 3. A few of the last ones I learned have 2 instead, and the last one has no crown at all.

Belatedly I asked Google about “Duolingo crown levels”. What I learned was that each skill (the circles like “Intro”, “Greeting” or “Food 1”) starts out without crowns when you begin learning it. Then after a few 10-point exercises, you get your first crown level. Then you need many more exercises to get to level 2, and many more than that again to get to level 3. For instance, let us say you get to level 1 after four exercises, you may need 14 more exercises (for a total of 18) to get to level 2, and 24 more (for a total of 42) to get to level 3. The numbers can vary depending on the topic, but seem to be roughly on that scale. You can get all the way up to 5, which would presumably require an insane number of exercises for each skill. Hopefully, someone else has exact statistics, if not maybe I will. Yeah, right. There is always someone more autistic than me, thank goodness.

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Being on the PC anyway (because it is better for reading large amounts of text, for me) I decided to run a Japanese exercise there. I used the usual “Strengthen” button. Bad idea. Web exercises are harder than mobile exercises, and Japanese is already in the “learning zone” for me every day, sometimes worse.

Have I talked about the challenge zones? From easy to hard you have the Boredom Zone, the Comfort Zone, the Learning Zone, and the Panic Zone. (Some use three or five zones, but the important part is to stay in the Learning Zone for deliberate practice. Repeating things in the comfort zone has much lower value, and the other two have no value at all and may even make you quit.)

So I suddenly found myself in a looong lesson that was around halfway in my learning zone and halfway in my panic zone. I actually stood up and walked away, but came back after calming down and reflecting for a few minutes, and completed the exercise.

Japanese is hard, you guys. I say this every time, don’t I? It is true every time, that’s why.

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Looking at the French skill tree, which I came pretty far down before Japanese became available, I find that there are fewer crowns per skill bubble, typically 2 while most of my Japanese bubbles have 3. This is because I usually do one “dumbbell” (strengthen) exercise each day. The AI tries to pick something that is challenging but not scarily hard. If I breeze through it without errors, or with only a couple errors, I move on to learn something new for my second exercise. That is why I have moved further down the French skill tree but with fewer repetitions for each skill. French is simply easier. (Probably not for the Japanese, but certainly for me.) I don’t really see myself going back and doing the basics of French a hundred times to get to the max “crown level”, honestly. You need to be extremely competitive to waste your time on that, it would be boring and you don’t learn from doing boring things. Japanese though? I suspect that if I get to “crown level” 5 in every skill bubble, I will still struggle. But who knows. If I live that long, I intend to let you know.

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.