Category Archives: Languages

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.

***

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.

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.

“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. ^_^;