自己紹介 – Fluent Japanese Speaker reviews Duolingo Japanese Course #2 – Greetings
This is the second post in a series about my experience with the Duolingo Japanese course as a fluent Japanese speaker.
If you have not read my first post where I explain learning Hiragana with Duolingo go ahead and check it out. I also have other tips and things to watch out for. Such as not relying on Duolingo’s audio and other resources to help you before starting the Duolingo course.
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.
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In a Nutshell
This lesson was pretty good but could have added more greetings. Japanese is a language full of different ways to say please and thank you. I think they did a good job of keeping everything simple and understandable.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/
Japanese also has several other set phrases such as お疲れ様です (おつかれさまです – Thank you for your hard word) which are used all the time but do not exist in English. Greetings and words used in social situations are even more important in Japanese to navigate through complex social situations. I think Duolingo should have added more of these Japanese specific phrases.
ありがとう – Read Lesson Tips First
The Duolingo Japanese lesson on greetings has a good, simple way to describe how to say thank you.
In Japanese, the way you say thank you will differ based on who you are talking with. If you are talking with a friend, teacher, family and so on you will speak a little differently.
Also, in Japanese depending on when the action took place, you will say thank you for a little differently. This Lesson explains this difference between ありがとうございます and ありがとうございました in a simple, concise way. Most introductory sources I have seen don’t even mention this difference.
If you are interested to learn more, I have two blog posts I wrote about saying thank you. One on the different ways to say thank you, and another on the difference between ありがとうございます and ありがとうございました.
どうも – This means Thank you and so much more
This course explains the word どうも as a way to say thank you to friends. Yes it does mean thank you and can be used with friends. It also can be a used with strangers and so on.
どうも can also mean hello, goodbye, or other greetings and can be used in a number of other ways.
どうぞ – Kind of means please
どうぞ in Japanese is used the same way as to please in English. That is it can be added to some phrase to make it sound more polite. どうぞ also can mean, go ahead, here you go and is used all the time in different situations.
よろしく – A very versatile word in Japanese
Out of the other words I introduced, this one you will probably hear the most. It was translated by the Duolingo Japanese lesson as nice to meet you but like other greeting words, it means more than that. It can be used to make requests, ask someone to say hi to someone else for you, and so on. There are many ways to use よろしく.
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.
Also, if you want to learn more ways to greet people in Japanese, check out my post, 8 ways to say ‘Hello’ in Japanese.
