What is the alternative to Duolingo that has worked best for you? I’m especially interested in learning Japanese
Lingo Deer is pretty much the same thing for Asian languages, iirc
Try ankiweb.net or the ankidroid android app to download flashcards for all sorts of things. Basically users make custom decks and you can download them for your own use or even make your own.
I’m trying to use a combination of Genki and Renshuu, but learning this on your own is still incredibly rough.
I would recommend staying away from Duolingo, personally, because it not only heavily promotes memorization over understanding, but also often teaches you things completely wrong. This doesn’t apply to just Japanese, and it’s matching the experience of other people I’ve talked to
If you’re serious about becoming fluent, apps will not give that to you. Ditch everything else and focus on input.
More here: https://refold.la/simplified/
I feel like it depends a bit on the language you’re learning, which one you’re coming from, how your brain works, and how much you’re willing to think about the exercises instead of just doing them.
I’m currently using Duolingo to learn esperanto, which is admittedly a bit of an oddball language since it’s a constructed language and the grammar follows pretty simple rules. Ive been at it for a bit over a year and while I still have a long way to go, I feel like I’m well on my way to being fluent, mostly I need to pad out my vocabulary more, and my ear could use more training.
It helps that a lot of the words look/sound pretty familiar to me as an English speaker, and the kind of person who likes picking the sentences apart a bit and actually figuring out the grammar and such as I’m going.
I took a few years of french in high school, none of it really stuck, and I think the traditional classroom approach just doesn’t work very well for me in learning a language. But I think if I had something like Duolingo at the time where I was just kind of thrown to the wolves and made to figure it out myself I would have been more successful
I use Duolingo for Spanish but also practice with Spanish speakers. I also click on the forum stuff for info on grammar, because I don’t think the grammar really comes through in the app if you don’t already know the gist of the rules. Or I look it up in a Spanish text.
But the vocab practice i do find helpful.
I agree. This website has been very useful and encouraging on my language learning journey.
Nothing beats creating your own deck. Check out Anki as others have mentioned. Back before starting university when I still had time/motivation, I used the Yomichan browser extension to create flash cards out of sentences I come across online.
