08-07-2018, 12:51 AM | #101 |
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Lafayette, Indiana
Posts: 20,578
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Alright, not sure if this is representative of other Duolingo courses or not, but ...
Looking on the Duolingo forums, it's lookin' like this is the case. Most of the posters are bright-eyed beginners just getting started on their Japanese adventures. And one of them asks, "Are people who have completed the Japanese course to level 25 proficient in Japanese?" To which the top-voted reply is, "This course alone? Absolutely not. You'll be able to read and write kana, sure, but actual Japanese (with kanji)? No. I've completed this course months ago, studied on the side and my reading skills are still B1-ish/JLPT N4-N3; Duo was a good foundation to get me started, but you won't get anywhere past JLPT N5 using it on its own." So yeah. It doesn't seem like Duolingo is worth anyone's time if they're N3 or above -- at least not yet! That's not to say that the Japanese Duolingo team can't make the offerings worth an N3, N2, or N1 student's while. But for right now, at least, it doesn't look like that's on offer. Hell! They don't even really test for kanji proficiency. A highly-upvoted thread on their forum is one eager member cross-posting the lists of kyouiku characters from Wikipedia or wherever else, and people are excitedly thanking him for the inside scoop. ^^; #bless So like ... yeah. ^^; This is not for people who already know how to write a thousand characters. This isn't even for people who know how to write their first 240. This is for people who are just starting out, who want to learn a little more Japanese than "SUGOI! " and "KAWAII! ". And to that I say, God bless. Good luck and I hope you have a wonderful time ahead of you.
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08-07-2018, 01:44 AM | #102 | ||
時の彼方へ
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Lafayette, Indiana
Posts: 20,578
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Quote:
Quote:
Q: お母さんはお元気ですか?But if it's frustrating for the N2, it is a learning nightmare for the aspiring N5! How is he to know what 元気 means? What is he to make of the prefix お? Will it really be clear to him what the distinction is between 母 haha and お母さん okaa-san? "If I were doing this as a novice," you wrote, "I would probably have given up after a few lessons." EXACTLY! I think it's really great that you're learning Chinese. I don't know what else to say! I hope it will be as rewarding for you as Japanese has been for me. Quick aside: a coworker of mine shared with me today the following Chinese sentence. I wonder if you can read it? :o 我先走了 We have all of these same characters in Japanese, but we don't use all of them the same way. Spoilers: Spoiler: show Spoiler: show
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08-07-2018, 02:03 AM | #103 |
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Saskatchewan, Canada
Posts: 1,488
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I only know one of those characters so far: 我. At first, I thought 走 was 是 (to be) with the tiny font, but now I see that it's slightly different. I've got 112 words in my catalogue so far. Thankfully, learning the numbers 1-9 was easy because of mahjong tiles. Thanks Akagi.
One thing I found amusing is that "United States" is 美国, which literally means "beautiful country." I thought: Awwwww, how nice. But then a Chinese guy explained that it's just a coincidence, because 美 (Mei) sounds the most like "America" but it sounds like the Chinese guy was just being tsundere ...
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01-01-2019, 01:21 AM | #104 |
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Saskatchewan, Canada
Posts: 1,488
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Found an interesting tier list from the Foreign Service Institute, who train diplomats, for the hardest languages to learn for an English speaker based on the average time it takes students to achieve "professional working proficiency":
https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreig...ge-difficulty/ As you can see, Japanese is in the highest tier with an asterisk beside it, meaning that it's even harder than the other category IV languages. So congratulations all you Japanese learners for picking THE HARDEST LANGUAGE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD to learn! If you can succeed with this, you can overcome anything! And if you've been studying a language for longer than the classroom hours listed and still aren't fluent, don't feel bad because you have to keep in mind that the classroom hours are based on the hardcore training that diplomats receive, which is probably the most effective language training known to man. There's also an assumption that the students already have natural talent for picking up languages. I also saw an update that French received an upgrade in difficulty, needing an additional 6 weeks of training compared to the other category 1 languages because a lot of students were missing their proficiency deadlines: https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/247092.pdf
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01-01-2019, 08:33 AM | #105 |
我が名は勇者王!
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Curiously, I've heard that Spanish speakers apparently have an easier time grasping Japanese, and visa versa?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BOJyl0QSRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkwYaMdtCsI I'm just going out on a limb here, but I think Spanish - with most words and consonant pairs ending in vowels - makes it easier to transition to Japanese which is the same way. It's a huge reason why most songs in English must rhyme or they sound cringey, all rhymes end in vowels, and the metere forces English into a form that's more pleasant to the ear, if a little boring.
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