Hacker News Reader

Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I've been learning japanese (and living in japan) for the past few months, and tried out duolingos new course when they released it yesterday. I've used quite a few different apps and books, and I must say I was pretty unimpressed. Their lessons give very little info on what you're learning, and with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning. I will experiment with it a bit more, but I've already done the first 6 or 7 lessons (chapters?) and am not impressed.

If you want to see an incredibly well built japanese learning tool, look at Human Japanese http://www.humanjapanese.com/ - i am in no way affiliated, just a happy student

View on HN

I second this and add Satori Reader (by the makers of Human Japanese, I think) for learning to read and grammar by example. I would also strongly recommend WaniKani for anyone learning kanji.

There's no substitute for immersion and classroom time, though.

I've been using Human Japanese fairly consistently for the last 6 months or so. I have a few chapters left so can't speak to the Kanji sections but I've really enjoyed the app as a whole. I found hiragana/katakana to be a little rough because the sets of characters were spread out so I recommend a flashcard app for the characters instead. But the context and style of presentation the app has makes it so easy to understand what you are actually trying to accomplish. Big fan.

> with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning

Damn, that's precisely the opposite of how you should learn them.

My Japanese ability pretty much exploded after I set aside two months to study the kanji divorced from their readings with James Heisig's method. Totally worth it. The readings come with time.

Indeed. It's my understanding that the success of kanji in China was exactly that some lord on the borderlands could write with kanji what he wanted to convey, and then, at the heart of the empire someone could read it back in mandarin. While the border Lord might only speak some local language.

The parallel is to teach everyone Latin language and how to read and write Latin letters, rather than just teach everyone how to read and write kanji.

Who is James Heisig, and what is his method? I'd like my Japanese ability to explode too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_kanji

I found that to ask to answer to a question to a word that you never saw in your life, and just try to figure it randomily is not an efficient way. I tried Duolingo way to teach Japanese and found it very frustrating ...

ex : what is the word for "read" ? and then to have to choose between 4 words written in hiragana or translate "ろく” having 6 choices ...

Thanks. I recently purchased the Human Japanese app, and I took a 2 year subscription on japanesepod101.com. I wasn't sure whether duolingos would have been a better choice. Probably not. But I'm still happy to have read your message. I'll stick to the two tools I've paid for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com