自己紹介 – Fluent Japanese Speaker reviews Duolingo Japanese Course #4 – Intro 1 ~ 2
This is blog post number four about my review of the Duolingo Japanese course as an advanced Japanese learner.
In my last post of this series, I reviewed the Katakana lessons. In that post, I talked about what I thought was good and what was odd.
If you want to read about my entire experience then check out my first post.
INDEX
Pronouns in Japanese
In the Intro 2 Lesson, Duolingo covers pronouns (I, you, he, she). I thought it was good that they explained in the tips section that in Japanese you will often not say I or you (わたし、あなた).
I don’t know if that is unique to Japanese but referring to yourself or referring to someone else in Japanese is very different from English.
Use the words from the Lesson
One thing I did not like about the tests for these lessons was how Duolingo wanted a specific answer to there question and marked me wrong when I was right.
Instead of using ぼく when referring to 田中茂 (Shigeru Tanaka) I used わたし once and was marked wrong. It may be more common for males is certain situations to refer to themselves as ぼく but using わたし is certainly not wrong. It may actually be more preferable in some situations.
Also, one question in English asked me how to say I am an American and I answered 私はアメリカ出身です. Duolingo marked this wrong and wanted me to use 私はアメリカ人です. It is true that アメリカ人 would translate directly to American and アメリカ出身 means from America. Either way, it means the same thing. Also just a lesson or so before I answered the same question with 私はアメリカ出身です and it was correct. I am sure that can be confusing when you are told that one thing is right in one lesson than wrong in the next.
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.
