does duolingo actually seem helpful?

I think if u already know the language somewhat, it’s a good way to refresh (altho I wouldn’t solely depend on it as the only source). I wouldn’t say that u could learn a completely new one from it, unless you’re very good at picking up grammar rules just from some sentences, and even then not as the only source.

Altho when I took a swedish course (in university (it’s mandatory lol)), there was someone who was actually good at it and they said it was bc of the over 1000 day swedish streak in duolingo. So it could work for some (but also I’m assuming they didn’t start swedish from scratch with duolingo, bc it’s mandatory here from elementary school onward)

(Answering publicly as an ask with permission)

For screenreaders, the text reads:

Hello! Sorry to bother you again... You've mentioned quite a lot of times that you're learning japanese and I see you're even able to read manga in the original text(kudos to you for that!) I'm an aspiring japanese learner myself-I've recently mastered all the hiragana and katakana, but I'm kind of clueless how to continue from there, since I'm studying on my own. Do you maybe have any tips on what I could tackle next? Sorry that I couldn't send this as an ask. Unfortunately tumblr isn't really cooperating with me today. Thanks a lot in advance!

This is going to be a long story, because: this is actually the third time I’ve tried learning Japanese.

The first time, my parents bought me a (I’m told very expensive) program for Christmas when I was twelve to learn Japanese at home--it came with a bunch of CDs and books and things. It was a lot like all of the materials for a foreign language course, at home.

But I was twelve and didn’t know what I was doing, and had no support or encouragement from anyone else, just a desire to learn, so it didn’t end up really working out. I remember some of the info from the books, but honestly, it just didn’t work for me. I didn’t really even know how to use any of the stuff.

In college, I made it through three semesters of Japanese. I learned a lot there, but it, again, didn’t quite work. I had my classmates and a couple friends, a teacher, but I have never been motivated by grades, and there just wasn’t much of a reason to keep on.

Anyway, years later, JR happened, and I desperately wanted to read them, but I was nowhere near close to being able to tackle that. At all. So I picked up Duolingo and found that my Japanese from college was coming back to me, and that was pretty cool, but it’s not like I was getting anywhere. JR is much too high a level for me to really take a crack at.

And then I ran out of YuuMori scans.

This was back in...November? The end of October? When only up to chapter 27 had been translated, and a new chapter was getting uploaded in English every month or two. And I was dying, because I’d been reading like a volume a night and other people were definitely going to accidentally spoil things for me and I hate spoilers.

But a couple of my friends who are fluent in Japanese were reading it that way, and after I saw a couple screenshots, I noticed that everything had furigana in it, and after some puzzling with a dictionary, I could figure out some of the speech bubbles, because I still remembered my kana from college! Cool! I asked one if they thought I could manage is, and she was encouraging, so after a week of debating, I went and bought volume seven so I could keep reading.

This has been going much better, and I’ve been learning far more Japanese than I have before.

Why this time?

I have a really good reason to keep reading (YuuMori, yay! Fan comics! Random stuff from Japanese people on twitter!) that I can actually hope to mostly manage because it’s not too high a level for me to make it through (although...the politics in YuuMori is...rough.)

I have friends who are fluent in Japanese this time (did not have that before--I could ask the Japanese TAs in college, but we weren’t friends, so it always felt awkward). I can ask them for help, they correct me when I get things wrong, and sometimes I pop into their DMs like “Hey, I keep finding this weird grammar bit that I don’t understand and isn’t in the dictionary, what does it mean?” And since I’m livetweeting, if they see I got something very off, they’ll comment and go, “Hey, actually....” or will help if I’m totally confused.

One of them is a Japanese to English translator, so she gave me the recommendation for the Japanese to English dictionary I’m using (which is super useful, omg), and a browser extension, which is also really helpful.

Plus, having multilingual friends is really nice when I’m like “Hey, this part of learning a language is like...normal, right? It’s a good sign, not a sign I’m a total disaster?” and they can reassure me because I’m anxious.

Another friend also recommended this book called All About Particles, which has been useful for that part of Japanese that I reference a lot. Another recommended I pick up Learning the Kanji but I haven’t gotten around to that just yet.

I have a couple friends who are also not quite fluent who I DM back and forth in Japanese from time to time, which helps up both practice, too. Having a reason to really use the language is incredibly necessary for me. After all, language is a communication tool, right?

There’s also this cool website I found a few weeks ago that I haven’t had a chance to use yet called https://learnnatively.com/. It ranks Japanese books and manga on their difficulty, so you can buy and try to read them (after all, that’s how little kids in Japan learn Japanese--isn’t it?).

Another thing I was doing all fall and winter, but have mostly stopped now, was taking out a notebook (my old Japanese notebook, lol), and diagramming out the sentences. Okay, sure, I could look up words in the dictionary, but I needed to figure out how they fit together. So I would write them out in order with the particles, look up the conjugations and particles on google, and then note that, and then piece together how all the words fit together.

I don’t need to do that so much anymore (although it would probably be helpful, lol). But then, I’m very gifted with grammar and always have been. A couple of my friends who are fluent have commented they’re very impressed by how fast I’ve picked up the Japanese grammar, and even my mother was like, “Yeah, you’ve always been good at that since you were little...” And discussing some linguistic things with my friend who has a Master’s in translation led to her asking me if I’d studied it because I said things that she’d heard there, which..well, no, it just made sense to me.

So. I have that going for me, too.

There’s also tons of podcasts and YouTube series and things like that designed to help learning Japanese...that’s not really how I learn, so I haven’t been using them and can’t give any recs. But they’re certainly out there!

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s been going pretty well, all things considered.

I hope this helped, and if not, was at least sort of interesting to read.

another infrequent update

NOTE: a few links and whatnot are missing from this post, several YouTubes, etc. I will add them very shortly, and if I do not, then please remind me!

Hello everyone, I know it’s been awhile once again. It’s not that I haven’t been doing language things (quite the contrary), but rather that I don’t have time to tell you about them. A quick rundown of what I’ll be talking about here:

Travels and how language related:

-my trip to Toronto

-my trip to Hong Kong

-a brief mention of my trip to Cancun

What I have learned, language wise, since my last update:

-Norwegian

-German

-Welsh

-Hungarian

-Russian

-Turkish

I went to Toronto with my girlfriend Marisa since my last update. Toronto is of course an English majority city so there isn’t a ton to write about that, but it’s worth noting just how bilingual Canada is in many ways. Most people in Toronto can’t speak French, or rarely speak it, but it’s as prevalent as Spanish is in the US. Everything is cosigned in both languages, and of course the government enforces Canada’s bilingualism, which was extremely interesting. I’ll be interested to visit a really bilingual city in Canada, like Ottawa or Montreal, where everyone can speak both languages.

Hong Kong had been one of my top cities to visit after I got the airline job (and before that, too). There was obviously absolutely no way it was going to disappoint, and luckily it didn’t in the slightest. Definitely the best place I have been to to date (lovely English right there!), on so many levels. It’s extremely welcoming and inviting to an outsider, insanely easy to get around, very safe, etc. But to the world tourist, the level of English spoken in Hong Kong is extremely impressive. Literally everyone in Hong Kong spoke English that I spoke with, to a very good degree. Curiously, the Filipino domestic helpers spoke some of the poorest english (they stuck to Tagalog), and more obviously, the mainland tourists spoke very little (if any) English. I used Mandarin a few times, but interestingly I used German quite a bit (there’s apparently quite a bit of German expatriation in Hong Kong). I was caught off guard with the German, considering I was fairly out of practice (but usually made out just fine!), but I came armed with the Mandarin. Using HelloChinese and a few audio resources (Living Language) I had a conversational amount down, though I never used it to that degree (it would just be pointing someone in the right direction or making small talk), after really seeing Mainland Chinese in action in Hong Kong, I felt very motivated to really work on my Mandarin. Sadly, I haven’t much since my trip ended, but I’m sure I’ll pick it back up at some point - I love Mandarin and always preach how simple it is to everyone and tell people it’s far easier than people think. Because it is...once you accept that the characters are an “over time” thing. And as expected, the little Cantonese I spoke (“ni ho”, “mh’goi”, “ching”, etc) was received very well, but considering how widely English was spoken, it was just my sign of gratitude to the natives.

I did visit Cancun, Mexico with Marisa as well, because it was affordable, accessible, and warm. While it wasn’t great (we had a good time together though), I’ll of course cover the language situation there. Largely of course English to cater to tourists, a few people did indeed lead with Spanish, which was surprising. I had an Uber driver who only spoke Spanish and so he and I pieced through a conversation together, and he was helping me learn. But still, the Spanish language and I don’t really click sadly. A shame, as I want to visit Madrid, Colombia (any city), Santiago de Chile, and of course return to Buenos Aires. But luckily Marisa knows and likes Spanish, so she can come with me and help out with that until I’m back on track.

Okay, now an update on my language study stuff. I could post Duolingo stats but eh I don’t think those give as accurate an estimation as me describing my progress. So, I’ve been focusing on Norwegian a lot recently, which is without question my favorite language. I’ve been really focused on finishing the tree, and am at Level 17 on Duolingo. Admittedly, Duolingo is the only resource I’m using for Norwegian right now. No books, no YouTube, no audio, just Duolingo. So the terrible robot voice that Duo uses is my only way of hearing the language at the moment, but I’m doing that on purpose. Going to finish the tree and really have this language down, and then see how quickly I really pick up on it when I hear it spoken by actual people. It’s such a simple and logical language on almost every level that it’s amazing. The grammar is just so much more simple than any other language. The verb conjugations (or relative lack thereof), definite articles (which are suffixes), word order, negation (just “ikke”) just all make so much sense. The amazing Paul (Langfocus) did an awesome video about Norwegian and its relation to Swedish and Danish, with a lesser extent Faroese and Icelandic (both of which are far more complicated grammatically than the other three). In an ideal world, the Vikings and their successors would’ve pushed for Norwegian (or Swedish, but I like Norwegian and the culture of Norway just a bit more) to be the universal language of the world instead of English. Norwegian is an easier and better language than English, and it’s far more logical in ways (grammatically and pronounced) than English ever could be. It (as well as Swedish and Danish) also lacks the case system that comes along with German, which makes it much easier to learn than the main language of its family. Through Norwegian, you can almost fully understand Swedish. I haven’t done Swedish on Duolingo at all, but I can read Swedish text incredibly well, point out and translate words in IKEA, and breeze through Memrise and Tinycards decks, thanks to my understanding of Norwegian. I can understand written Danish to the same degree, but it’s a wildly different language when spoken. I haven’t studied Danish much, but I’m sure once you’re used to how they pronounce things (like Spanish/Portuguese differences), you’ll be in great shape. I can’t wait to hopefully visit Oslo this summer, as I still have not gotten to speak Norwegian in real life at all yet, but am confident I can do so….well, confidently. We will find out soon.

I am returning to Germany in a few weeks, and in preparation I’m of course going through my German resources again. Reguilding Duolingo, going through some advanced levels on Memrise, playing around on Babadum, and things like that. German is annoyingly difficult/tricky in so many ways (and after learning one of the North Germanic languages, it will frustrate you more once you’ve learned just how simple it all can be!!!), but I’m convinced the language runs through my blood and is almost second nature to me at this point, which I’m extremely grateful for. I can jump into conversations often, understand it when I hear it (even Swiss German!), and generally carry myself along. I just wish it wasn’t so difficult for new learners who aren’t picking it up in a classroom setting - it really is a difficult language to teach yourself, especially if you’ve never dealt with a three gender language AND one that has a case system, no less. Plus, “sie” can mean she/formal you/they, which I’m sure can certainly trip anyone up. That’s just a bit impractical, but luckily I have that advantage I guess.

I dabbled briefly in Welsh on Duolingo. A very fun and surprisingly simple language, I put it on hold temporarily due to my desire to focus on other languages. Nonetheless, I found it super interesting, though of course often difficult to pronounce. The “dd” sound in Welsh is maybe the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted to pronounce, and I’m convinced only natives will ever master it. I want to see this language kept alive, so certainly give it a shot - the Duolingo course is wonderful and very well designed, and this YouTube video (linked within the course) will teach you how to pronounce the language very well.

My last three languages I’ll sort of talk about together. They are Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish. Three languages from different families (but I guess a similar part of the world), but damn are they a lot of fun to me. I’m actually glad I waited a week to write this post, as I attempted to look at Turkish again last night for the first time in ages and it suddenly made tons of sense to me - being an agglutinative language and all, just like Hungarian and to a lesser extent Russian. All three of these languages are pretty “out there” for an English speaker, and I’ll agree, some of the trickiest for an English speaker to learn, as they have a lot of rules. But honestly that’s a lot of the fun, once you get the rules down and can form sentences and work with the case system (all three languages feature a case system), you feel really accomplished speaking these beautiful languages. Russian always tends to amaze me, the amount of loanwords and similar vocabulary in Russian will really surprise you. Once you master the Cyrillic alphabet, I bet you could look at a Russian text and point out so many words that are similar to the Romance or Germanic languages. This makes for fun learning once you figure out the Slavic twist to put on each word. The lack of articles in Russian and verb “to be” is of course a massive advantage - once you dig into the language you realize just how much of a blessing this is. I’m really enjoying Russian, and while I still make plenty of grammar mistakes and still struggle to pronounce some things, I can’t wait to really get this language down and be able to speak it with confidence. While I won’t be able to speak Hungarian with sure confidence probably for a long time, it’s an extremely fun language to me. It has something like 15 cases - definitely an extreme amount, and not a language for the faint of heart, but if you’re really into this kind of thing you may want to look into it. The alphabet and pronunciation are quite simple once you get them down, and word order is very free thanks to the case system (similar to Russian!). Plus, the Hungarian people are great and amazed anyone attempts to learn their very hard language. I’m going to see for myself when I go to Budapest next month and attempt to drag some Hungarian out (they’re also attempting to learn English widespread, as tourism in Hungary amongst Europeans is climbing), and we’ll see if the rumors are true about how happy Hungarians are that we even let out a “szia” (hello/goodbye) or a “köszönöm” (thank you) in conversation. If you’re scared off by Russian’s foreign alphabet and Hungarian’s crazy amount of cases, then maybe Turkish is a good place to start if you’re interested in an agglutinative language that differs wildly from English and the languages similar (romance/germanic). Turkish follows a Subject+Object+Verb order which is kind of fun because you know the action is always at the end, and the vocabulary is very cool (and apparently features tons of Persian and Arabic loanwords). While I haven’t dove too deep into Turkish, by the time my next update rolls around, I believe I will have more to tell you, as I plan to get right back to Turkish on Duolingo once I’ve posted this. While neither Turkey (political situation) nor Russia (complicated visa issues) would be suitable to visit now, Azerbaijan would be a good place I think, as a large part of the population still speaks Russian, a lot speak English (thanks to all the expats), and their native language, Azerbaijani (or Azeri Turkish) is apparently very close to Turkish, so someone who knows Turkish well can quickly pick up on Azerbaijani. I wonder if the differences are as close as Norwegian to Swedish or more like Spanish to Italian. Maybe I’ll know by the time I write here next.

I also am attempting to learn the Greek alphabet because why not (the lowercase letters are throwing me off big time - why must they be different from the uppercase?!) and of course still looking at Italian, French, etc from time to time. I don’t have any decent observations on these developments.

Hopefully I’ll write to you all again soon. Follow me on Instagram or something if you’d like more frequent updates about my life.