I've been using Duolingo for Japanese since early last year (I'm level 11 if that means anything to you) and for the last few weeks I've been using it in tandem with Renshuu while I recover from brain surgery.
I have had more luck and ease with learning hiragana and katakana with Renshu in these few weeks than entire months with Duolingo. I think the mnemonics, flashcard framework, and deemphasis on romanization is helping greatly. I can't believe that I am now reading and understanding words in a new written language.
The communal aspect is fantastic and I may be asking this question just to get comfortable with further participation down the line.
I don't hate Duolingo like some other Japanese learners I know, but Renshuu makes it feel like Duo takes things as slow as possible... possibly so you sign up for premium to accelerate your learning. I really appreciate Renshuu allowing me to take things at whatever pace I feel is right for me. Duolingo gets a plus because it teaches many languages... luckily I only care about this one!
Duolingo is basically designed to keep people learning the basics of the language for as long as possible so that they feel like they're progressing without actually learning very much, that way they have as many users as possible compared to apps where many people drop it as soon as it gets hard. It's like designed for people who aren't serious about learning
I quit after they nuked the community features and gradually shifted to AI. In general it lacks depth and customisation, so if you're serious about learning the language there are much better options.
There's also the fact that not all Duolingo courses are created equal. French and Spanish are likely the most developed. Japanese is popular, but was never all that fleshed out.
PS: I wonder if they still have this gem of a sentence: すみません、私はりんごです。= "Excuse me, I am an apple" (official translation) 🤣
Duolingo is great but only for your first 1-3 months of dabbling in a new language and seeing how you feel. I always start there, even though i dont like the company or the system itself. I used to have 1-2 hours daily for a long while but its become pretty unusuable for me after the tree change. It seems to still be getting worse as well.
I started using Duolingo for Japanese back in 2021 and have used it ever since then. Back when I first used the service I would say as a whole it was better than it it is now though from a beginner's perspective it wasn't good back then. They started introducing several Kanji before I even got Hiragana and Katakana down back then, though they changed this later.
However over the past year Duolingo has changed a lot and become way more filled with ads and such and I really felt like stopping it, but my family got a family subscription so I'm going to hang on until the end, especially since I'm almost done with the Japanese course on Duolingo (currently at 94 out of 100).
If you're finding Renshuu to work better, I think you should prioritize it over Duolingo. I only found about Renshuu last summer and I really wish I found it sooner so I didn't have to stick through Duolingo for so many years. Ever since I started using Renshuu my Japanese has improved at a far faster rate. Duolingo's Japanese also has a lot of errors in it nowadays in addition to all the ads and everything, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore.
Duolingo is "slow" on purpose. And that's why it's popular. It prevent you from learning too much too fast. With renshuu, and similar app (like Anki), you have the freedom to you learn the way you want. And that's the problem (or weakness). Because you can screwed up more easily, don't feel any progress and give up too.
On those app, a lot of beginners give up before even starting to really learn japanese. They don't with duolingo. And when they get tired of duolingo because it's too "slow", they move on to another app like renshuu or anki. And this time they don't give up ironically.
So overall, it's just a trade off between "learning stability" vs "learning efficiency". And efficiency doesn't mean better. When it's even efficient. Pure SRS (Space Repetition System) without restraint, like renshuu or anki, are critized for a lot of things. Not by online communities unfortunatly but mainly by scientist. A lot of intermediate learners still struggle with producing sentences for example. One of the reason is simply because they believe by just using Renshuu or Anki everyday, they will naturally be able to speak. They just learning a lot of individual items (words, kanji, etc) without structuring their knowledge.
Basically:
Efficiency without structure → fragile knowledge (Anki, renshuu, etc)
Structure without efficiency → slow progress (Duolingo, Textbook, Learning at school or with an online teacher, etc)
As a beginner, you shouldn't worry too much about that. Use the app that you like the most until you're beyond the "beginner" wall. When you pass that wall, you will "know" that you "can" learn and also how much you can learn. The first thing you should learn is not words, kanji or grammar. The first thing you should learn is how to learn consistently. Once you know how to do that, do whatever you want. And at that stage try to search about the weaknesses of the tool you're using.
Renshuu is my favorite tool to learn japanese but it's also just a tool that really help with only a few things. It's not a magical tool that will make you speak japanese by only doing daily review everyday consistently. On some aspect, I really wish some duolingo or more textbook exercises were on renshuu. But they are not, so I end up using other ressources or method to supplement that. Another pitfall of SRS system is that it make you focus only on words, kanji and also sometimes grammar (even if SRS are fundamentaly bad for grammar imo but that another topic). But learning a language is not only about that. Reading about japan's history, society, etc can also help a lot and allow to understand/memorize words/kanji/grammar faster. SRS kinda erase all of that and make you almost "addicted" to your daily routine. It's a great tool to memorize individual item. Not a perfect tool to learn a language.
But as I said, you shouldn't worry too much about that for now. Because if you can keep up, all those details will be useless. If you don't learn how to learn and make it into a habit, you will give up before you can use any of those tips anyway. If renshuu works for you, then good. If duolingo works for you, then good too. After that, just always think about yourself, search about the weaknesses of the different methods and then use the methods/tools (plural) that works the best for you.
While I don’t support Duolingo’s current practices, it’s still a decent way to start learning a language, and get a feeling of how it generally works. I only joined renshuu later in my journey and I feel like I would have been pretty confused if I started learning here. But to bash on Duolingo a bit more - it’s getting worse and worse. They are literally taking away its best features to turn it into an ai-powered cash grab, so I stopped using it after their insane ai-first statement. In that sense, I think, renshuu is 1000 times better; not to mention a bunch of super useful features it has and how flexible it is. And of course a single app isn’t enough to learn a whole language, so watch/read Japanese content; maybe get a textbook; if possible, find native speakers to practice writing and speaking with, etc
I genuinely think so too! At school, my french teacher suggests using Duolingo French for vocab and sentence building, and I think both Renshuu and Duolingo is quite helpful. I realize the strong opinions other learners have about using Duolingo, and for Japanese I think it's rather rudimentary. I also agree on your take for the katakana and hiraganabut for kanji definitely, I think Renshuu is stronger on the definition side, because they have a dictionary and a very avid user base ^^ Overall, I don't hate on people who use Duolingo nor do I hate the app, both are good in their own way
There's also the fact that not all Duolingo courses are created equal. French and Spanish are likely the most developed. Japanese is popular, but was never all that fleshed out.
PS: I wonder if they still have this gem of a sentence: すみません、私はりんごです。= "Excuse me, I am an apple" (official translation) 🤣
Oh gawd, I remember that nonsense phrase on Duolingo. Lol
I completely agree with you about Duolingo. It’s better for the Romance languages like Spanish and French. I don’t think it’s good for Asian languages like Japanese. I wouldn’t bother with a language learning app that teaches romaji tbh. I think Renshuu’s approach is better. Skip that romaji nonsense. I initially studied Japanese in high school and my teacher was a native speaker who didn’t bother with romaji. I think that’s the better approach.
Thanks for the input all - you seem to have healthy opinions and your responses will inform how I use the apps together. I've known about Duolingo's AI nonsense for a while but I put up with it because DL seemed like a good functional app where the good outweighed the bad. I definitely will rethink my stance on it.
While for me Renshuu has been the best and most flexible for staying consistent with my goals, a great Duolingo alternative is LingoDeer. It is designed to be a lot like Duolingo with the same node structure and progression, but it has no AI at all and is much better paced. It also has some SRS practice elements.
I think they do a great job and could be a great fit for some people, but it's also not free so that's a barrier to entry.
Duolingo kept me around cuz I thought I needed to keep a streak. I got tired of it. I don't constantly get messages from this app to keep up a streak when I need to freeze schedules and take a break which is one of the things I prefer. I can also add the schedules I want.
I've tried duolingo for a handful of different languages over the years, like Spanish, French, German, and now Japanese. I never went very far with most, I think Japanese is my best commitment so far with ~680 day streak now (but still only in section 2).
It may depend how different learning methods work for you, but I really do not think Duolingo is good for truly learning a language. It's great at making you memorize words and phrases, but never teaching you why you say them that way. It's no grammar, no conjunction, etc. The bird seems like a suitable mascot because I feel like it basically teaches you to be a parrot.
That's why I feel like I've learned more in my 2.5 months of using Renshuu (plus Bunpo, WaniKani, books, and some Kana apps) than in the nearly 2 years of Duolingo. Even still, I enjoy and feel confident answering questions and quizzes on these apps, and I still feel like I'm feeling around in the dark on duolingo sometimes.
Overall, I think Duolingo is best used to supplement other learning, or as daily practice to keep knowledge from previous study, rather than as a primary learning tool.
At this point, I'm pretty much only keeping up with it because I want to keep the streak going. If that ever breaks, I'm probably going to drop it.
I’m a complete beginner and haven’t used either of the apps for long (when it comes to Japanese). However, the reason I am here now, is actually because i got tired of Duo… lol XD. It’s reeeeeally slow. Like actually. I had the free version, and had to refill my hearts after basically every lesson I did. Imagine repeating: ”sushi to gohan kudasai” 10000x times just to watch 10000 minutes of ads. In addition, learning hiragana and katakana wasn’t essential and you can just skip it, which made me get used to the romaji style without ever learning the alphabets. Oh, while writing that, the app just sent me: ”PLEEEEEASE, come save your streak!!” That’s another thing - I hated the streak element of Duolingo, and how pushy the Owl gets if you try to quit. The app is very gamified, I started to feel pressure to go there everyday just for the streak, not because of learning. But it makes sense that the streak and the other price systems like chests and magic boosters lowered my motivation, because there are studies about how these kinds of rewards can actually kill instrinct motivation!
All in all, I would encourage everyone to do what works well for them. Duolingo didn’t work for me because of its highly gamified environment. It started to make me anxious like other social media platforms: in the end it just gave me a dopamine hit to keep my streak going, while in Renshuu I get my dopamine from actually learning itself, not for some effects that are designed to get you hooked. And here I’m actually learning hiragana and katakana which I didn’t learn in Duo at all, the ”Quick Draw” has shown to help me quite a lot already! On top of that, the makers of Renshuu are real people (and lovely folks too!), not some AI.
Okay damn, I didn’t mean to yap this much… ^^’ I hope this answer gave you some insight from someone who is still only in the very beginner stage of learning Japanese! And to clarify, I don’t want to hate on Duo or anything like that, this is just my personal experience with it. Thanks for reading and good luck with everyone’s studies! ٩( ᐛ )و ♪
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