Category Archives: Japanese

June 26, 2017 · 11:08 pm

Japanese on Duolingo – not perfect but still great

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.

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June 22, 2017 · 9:27 pm

Japanese – just the right challenge?

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.

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June 17, 2017 · 9:34 pm

Complain, complain…

“Complain, complain, that’s all you’ve done, ever since we lost” says Leonard Cohen in his song The Captain. And unfortunately it is that time again, as Duolingo keeps losing the qualities that made it the number one educational software of the world. How long they will be able to fend off the competition is uncertain at this rate.

The other day I discovered that on my Android smartphone and tablet, the training exercises have been replaced by 1-minute timed exercises. The duration of the old ones were approximately five minutes by my estimate, and they each gave 10 points, so two of them added up to my 20 points of minimum daily practice. The new timed exercises seem to give a higher point yield per minute: For Japanese, I get about 5 points for each. Japanese is kind of hard though as long as I still need to spell my way through the Hiragana rather than read them fluently.  In French, I get around 10 points, or the same as the much longer exercises we had before.

In any case, what we have now is a much higher advertising-to-practice ratio. And as the Swedes say, “Vem är det som tjänar på det?” Who is it that profits from that?

That said, Duolingo claim to gather a lot of information about the effect of various approaches, using A/B testing where some users are given one way of doing things and other users are given another, and they then roll out the most successful approach to everyone. What I am not sure of here is whether the success is for the learners. Financing a service with 150 million users is hard, and perhaps it does require showing ads every 61 seconds. So that could be one reason.

Or it is even possible that neurotypicals learn better under stress. Certainly a lot of them seem to go out of their way to place themselves in stressful situations, whether when playing games, or in traffic, or in their love life. It is as if they don’t really feel alive unless primal emotions are running high. Certainly the amygdala is more active in stressful situations, increasing learning dramatically. Unfortunately, amygdala-learning mostly consists of learning what to avoid. I am not sure Japanese introductions should fall in that category!

For me personally, stress mostly motivates me to find and eliminate the source of the stress, and this does not bode too well for my relationship with Duolingo. But for the time being at least, the timing of this new disturbance could not have been better: I can still do the old type of practice on my brand new iPad, ironically. Admittedly the ability to go directly to forum discussions from an individual exercise does not exist there, and has basically been disabled across the board for Japanese which does not have a web version. I miss that, as there were often helpful comments from people who were much more fluent in the language. But it is not bad enough to abandon my favorite language course right after it came out. So that’s something.

UPDATE: I am happy to announce that you can still get the longer exercises by choosing topics to practice in the skill tree, rather than using the default practice at the overview page.  I just scrolled down to the part of the French skills that were all gray (meaning they badly need practice) and just picked one to practice. Sure enough, I got the old long, non-timed practice. It seems to be only when you let the machine pick what to practice, that you get the timed exercise. I did not notice this in Japanese, because I don’t have any topics yet that are below full strength. ^_^;

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June 10, 2017 · 11:19 am

Japanese, finally!

Ever since Duolingo came out, Japanese has been the most requested language. But technical problems made it much harder to implement than European languages, which were prioritized first. Some time ago, as mentioned on this blog, Hebrew was released, written entirely in a non-Latin script from right to left. Still, this pales against Japanese with no alphabet as such but two syllabic scripts and one iconographic script with over 1000 icons. Japanese is also extremely context-based, where the same short phrase or sentence could have dramatically different meanings depending on the sentences that surround it. This is a problem when your main method of teaching is short sentences without context.

On May 18, though, Japanese was released for the ios operating system (Apple phones and tablets). Rather than at least a modicum of gratitude, the response was largely an overwhelming condemnation for not releasing it simultaneously on the Web and the Android app. You’d think someone would be happy to let the rich and fashion-conscious be the guinea pigs. However, around the start of June, Japanese was gradually rolled out to Android as well. I first found it on my Samsung Note 2, which is fairly old by today’s standards, but it worked nicely.  It is now universally available on Android devices. If you don’t find it, update your app in the Play Store.

While I don’t self-identify as an otaku, I do watch anime pretty much every week (legally, on Crunchyroll.com) and I have been hoping for Japanese on Duolingo since I learned about Duolingo. So naturally I am putting all other languages aside to learn Japanese.  I used to do 20 points a day (two 5-minute sessions) of either French or Swahili, some days both. Now I typically do 20 points in the day and another 20-30 points before bedtime, which is the recommended time to learn language for some reason. Science shows that you learn better if you sleep right afterwards, perhaps because you dream about it? Not that I remember doing that.

I breezed through hiragana, which I have learned before (repeatedly, as I forget them after some months). I was a bit dismayed to see that they immediately after introduced katakana, the less used syllabic script. (The two are not interchangeable in practice, although Japanese will be able to read a text easily in either of them. Katakana is mostly used for foreign words, also for scientific terms and for emphasis (somewhat like we use italics, although it is a lot more different than italics, more like the difference between upper and lower case letters, or between typeface and cursive handwriting.) My concern was that by introducing them immediately after each other, people would mix them up unnecessarily. If you waited a couple months the brain would find it much easier to archive them separately. I would in fact recommend introducing kanji – the Chinese icon script that has been adapted to Japanese – before katakana.

Not to worry: After enough katakana to spell a couple names, the app started on kanji. Interestingly, it does not seem to start with the most common necessarily, but rather the ones that are used in common introductions, like the two kanji that make up Nihon (Japan) and the three that between them make up gakusei (student) and sensei (teacher). Normally you would start with kanji that are routinely used on their own, like the kanji for “day”, then later show how to combine kanji. In reality, of course, most Japanese words written in kanji are combinations of two kanji. If you had to learn a separate kanji for each Japanese word, you would not get far with 1000 kanji, which is approximately what kids learn in public school over there. (Duolingo will not teach all of those, I am not sure how many but I seem to remember reading 80. That seems a bit low. Hopefully I shall live to tell you more.)

So far, so fun!

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