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Comment by joaodelvalle | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo has been postponing its launch of Arabic for English speakers for a while. Now, next date is March 1st 2019. https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online

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Duolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar. It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30 or however many language options.

I disagree. I'm using it to learn another language that is far from English, albeit one with much simpler grammar. I find it more effective than a grammar heavy course. You can know every rule of a language and still not be able to speak it at all. What you need is internalization of those rules via practice, which Duolingo provides.

It depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup, while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all, because the translation to English really doesn't work with Japanese. For example, they keep translating 'itadakimasu' (いただきます in Hiragana) to "Let's eat!", but that's not what it means. Otherwise the taxi driver wouldn't ask you '1980 yen itadakimasu'.. :) (and that's just one, there are so many.)

Are you sure you don't mean "gozaimasu" in the taxi driver example? I learned what little Japanese I do know from Duolingo and it was somewhat useful on a recent trip to Japan. Our tour guides were mostly impressed and certainly didn't point out any glaring issues with it (although that could be Japanese politeness).

I'm absolutely sure - I've lived in Japan, and my wife is Japanese. 'gozaimasu' is a word you add to a sentence to make it (even) more polite. E.g. 'Arigatou' - thanks. 'Arigatou gozaimasu' 'Thank you very much' (or whatever way you want to think about it). Same with phrases for 'good morning' etc. As for the taxi driver phrase, it goes like this: Normally when you ask for something in Japanese you would use for example 'kudasai' (=> 'give me', to the extent that it can be translated). But the taxi driver is serving the customer, and then that word is out of the question. Instead he is thanking for being given, which is basically what 'itadakimasu' means. And that's why that word works as something you say just before eating, but also why it does not translate to "Let's eat!". And working through phrase after phrase in Duolingo with only that kind of translations just doesn't work very well. And then months of comments and questions from users where they take the translation literally and figure they can use the same word as a metaphor in Japanese, the way the English translation can be used as a metaphor in English.. sigh. You don't learn how the language works that way. It can work as a (small) supplement when learning the language with other better tools, but I will state that you can't learn Japanese through only Duolingo. While you can actually learn Italian that way.

Any free alternatives to DuoLingo's Japanese offering or general advice?

An easy one is to start with Human Japanese (Windows, Android, or iOS). The 'light' version is free on Android and gives you the first chapters (seven, IIRC) to give you a taste of it. After that there are lots of resources.

Thanks :)

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/itadakimasu-meaning/

And yes, in Japanese culture it would be extremely rude to point out errors in a guest's attempts to speak the language.

Doesn't surprise me at all. Implementing right-to-left support in a product that's production-ready will require a lot of code rewrite.

But they already have Hebrew!

I had been using that as an excuse too :) but I've made some progress with Mango (may be available via a local library).

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