平仮名 – Fluent Japanese Speaker reviews Duolingo Japanese Course #1 – Hiragana
This is the first post in a series about my experience with the Duolingo Japanese course as a fluent Japanese speaker.
I started learning Japanese 20 years ago long before we had anything like Duolingo.
I have played with Duolingo in the past for other languages but thought it would be fun to see what the Japanese course was like.
INDEX
Hiragana 1 ~ 4 – Reading Japanese
The Duolingo Japanese course starts out teaching you Hiragana. If you have not started learning Japanese, Hiragana is one of Japan’s writing systems. It is like the ABC’s for Japanese.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/
To be honest, if you already know Hiragana it can be boring going through it again. Especially since there are 4 lessons with 5 levels to each of them. When you start the course you will get the option to skip Hiragana though. So make sure to select that if you already know Hiragana.
If not though, I would go through the Hiragana courses until you feel bored by it and then move on. You also have the option to test out of courses so if you are bored of learning Hiragana but not sure if you are ready to move on I would try testing out.
First do Tinycards Hiragana Course
Duolingo also has flashcard courses. They are called, Tinycards. After starting Duolingo’s Japanese course I found that they have a flashcard course on learning Hiragana.
This course shows the Hiragana characters on one side and a picture incorporating the Hiragana character on the other.
I suggest doing this course before starting the Duolingo Japanese course. Having a visual reference makes learning more fun. At least for me.
Do not rely on Duolingo’s Audio
To be fair, the pronunciation of the robotic voice on Duolingo is not bad. This issue is the accent or intonation of many words.
Japanese has what is called pitch-accent which means words are accented by raising and lowering your pitch. This is not a huge problem since few words in Japanese are distinguished on intonation alone. However, one area of Japanese where intonation is critical is for asking questions.
In Japanese a rising-intonation at the end of a word or sentence means you are asking a question. Japanese pitch is usually pretty flat compared to English, so only a slight variation is needed to distinguish the difference between a statement and a question in Japanese. This difference is small enough that is can be hard to distinguish if you are a native English speaker since English has much greater, and free variation one how pitch is used. Some of the words spoken by the Duolingo robot voice have a rising pitch making it sounds like it is asking a question.
It is only a small pitch difference so if you rely on the audio on Duolingo in the beginning it will make it harder to hear this slight difference. This will make it hard to distinguish often in Japanese when people are asking you a question or making a statement.
Instead, I would go to a different website, forvo, and listen to their audio there. They have several words spoken by various different native Japanese Speakers.
Some Confusion – Are you teaching me Hiragana or Vocabulary?
During the 4 Hiragana courses, Duolingo mixed in some words along with Hiragana. Since I already read Japanese I did not have an issue with this initially. But I thought it would be confusing for me if I did not know Japanese.
To test this I started a course in Russian which uses a different writing system. As expected, this was confusing for me. When I started the course instead of asking me individual characters it was asking me for words in the Russian alphabet when I had not even learned those letters yet.
So, before starting Duolingo I would go ahead and review a chart of Hiragana characters just to prime your brain in case Duolingo does not thoroughly cover those characters before showing them to you.
Stay tuned as I continue my Duolingo journey. I will continue to write more of my experience as I learn more. In the meantime I have written a whole other post on using Duolingo for Japanese.
