Post #4345076

I had a conversation last night with another furry learning Japanese (it seems like a rule, if you're a furry you'll try learning Japanese eventually lol) and he'd been studying a similar length of time to me, but he'd just been on Duolingo. He still can't type any Japanese (he asked me how I was doing it) and used ohayo gozaimasu in the evening, which made me sad because he could've easily gotten so much further. I have definitely not been on the most efficient path either, but I'm very comfortable with kanji and I can watch anime for fun (with Jap subtitiles anyway) I don't want to be discouraging, I want to fan the flames of other people's passion in language learning such that they succeed, but, if you're using Duolingo, there's better ways. You can't really learn a language in 15 minutes a day, and duolingo is a dopamine trap rather than a language course. Sure, for languages closer to English, you might get enough to make a meaningful difference if you travel to a relevant location, but you could get so much further in those languages by spending the time you would've spent on duolingo by just doing anki flash cards for common non-cognates and some basic grammar rules and listening to beginner podcasts while you clean or something. If you want to move beyond duolingo and don't know how feel free to poke me I can point at some resources and ramble about my own experiences if it's of value to anyone. If you're happy just using duolingo for fun in itself and don't actually mind that it's so slow that's fine too, fun is mandatory.