片仮名 – Fluent Japanese Speaker reviews Duolingo Japanese Course #3 – Katakana
This is the third post in a series about my experience with the Duolingo Japanese course as a fluent Japanese speaker.
In my last post of this series, I talked about Japanese greetings. In that post I explained how important greetings are in Japanese and the several different meanings they can have.
If you want to read about my entire experience then check out my first post.
INDEX
What I liked
I was actually impressed on how Duolingo introduced Katakana. They started by teaching just a few Katakana characters in each lesson. Each character was also used in specific words for names and countries which were the same or similar to their equivalent in English.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/
I felt like if I was learning Katakana for the first time this would help. Having a word that is mostly the same in English to associate the letters with makes in more memorable.
ツィ and ツェ – What words have tse and tsi?
Both ツェ and ツィ are uncommon sounds in Japanese. They are not sounds you are going see often or at all in Japanese. It is not impossible for these sounds to show up but it would be very uncommon. I am not sure why Duolingo wanted me to learn them?
One possible example from English I can think of is Twitter. This would actually be written as ツイッター (tsuittaa) with the ツ and イ being two separate syllables. Anyway, I thought it was kind of weird.
I will try to put out more posts on my experience as quick as I can get through the lessons. In the meantime, I have written a whole other post on using Duolingo for Japanese.
