Duolingo Shenanigans
Recently, my friend takes Japanese course online and supplements it with Duolingo. She can't read hiragana yet. Manwhile I already knew hiragana and katakana since middle school, thanks to UTAU software—many great stuff happened because of Vocaloid fan community. I feel intrigued by my friend's shaky beginner steps, because I'm stuck in a limbo between "can't understand bunch of Japanese world salad" and actually familiar with the language structure. Little whimsical, I downloaded the infamous loathed app Duolingo, to check how useful their courses are.
I knew controversies surrounding Duolingo. Weird advertisement is one thing, also the time when they transitioned into "AI-first company". My YouTube recommendation, which mostly related to social and tech commentary, were burned with news coverage. I had never been big Duolingo fan, but that app shaped my English usage in harsh way. Kid not, Duolingo is extremely intolerant towards "a"/"the"/"(word)s" typo. Imagine me, in 2015, randomly learning Norwegian influenced by Hetalia interest, was mad at Duolingo for nitpicking my answer.
Ah yeah, flashback to good ol days
For the first image, you can't blame my mistake. I'm thinking in Japanese, まいにち (毎日) (every day) is at beginning of the sentence. Y'all should be impressed I'm doing third language test with second language.
So, here's my attempt at skipping the lessons. I was curious where I would fail, so I pushed higher and higher.
Insane. I guessed the answers based on "vibes", my Japanese vocabulary is severely limited, especially involving advanced kanji. That means, focusing on word memorization is more important if I want to continue.
Conclusion? Meh. Duolingo holds your hands like a baby, their multiple choices are ridiculously easy, to the point you can get perfect score by elimination process instead of knowing the actual translation. Like, the choices are "1 true answer", "2 misleading but noticably off-topic baits". I don't think people will understand Japanese sentence structure with Duolingo, because they teach "fill ___ in a phrase" instead of breaking down the logic. Dangerous.
Learning language is about knowing the nuance, Thank God I'm a bit knowledgeable in both. I swear Duolingo taught something like "This T-shirt is a bit..." as a dislike statement. I know Japanese are nonconfrontational, still ridiculous.
Poking back at app nostalgia, I used to love Memrise before its enshittification. Aside of learning languages like basic Arabic, I did map memorization with Memrise. Wish that app never change.