趣味など – Fluent Japanese Speaker reviews Duolingo Japanese Course #8 – Position, Vacation 1, Hobby 1
Welcome to number 8 of my Duolingo Japanese course review as an advanced Japanese learner.
You can check out my last post here of this series. If you want to read about my entire experience then check out my first post.
INDEX
What is Covered in the Position, Vacation 1, Hobby 1 Lessons
These lessons taught how the equivalent of prepositions are used in Japanese. Unlike English, Japanese does not have prepositions but instead uses the name of locations with nouns. For example, in English if we said on the table, on would be the preposition.
https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/
In Japanese we would say 机の上 (つくえのうえ). の represents ownership or relationships between words. It is the same as of in English. So, 机の上 could be translated as the top of the desk.
Duolingo has some odd Phrases
This is not the first lesson that I thought so but Duolingo has some strange choices for phrasing. I am guessing that it is not always intentional. For example the phrase 布団の中で起きます (ふとんのなかでおきます) was translated as I wake up on my bed. Neither of these is incorrect but both of the phrases seemed unnatural to me. Sure, there are times when you could say this but I would have liked Duolingo to put more effort into making more natural sentences.
It is ok to use random sentences when learning the grammar of a language. This helps to learn the structure of Japanese. Just I would suggest not trying to memorize the sentences in Duolingo as they are sometimes strange. Instead, look for real content online to see how people actually speak Japanese. One possible source is Twitter. I have another whole article on 7 ways to learn Japanese which gives some more ideas for learning with real content.
My journey through Duolingo as someone who already knows Japanese will continue. In the meantime, I have written a whole other post on using Duolingo for Japanese.
