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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> how does someone learn from this?

Duolingo has brief explanations of the grammar for each unit. It's not even close to a textbook by any means but it's not impossible to learn. Now that I think about it, my mental algorithm works like this:

  1. Observe the words
  2. Observe the order they were used in
  3. Have their meanings in english as reference
  4. Use this information to puzzle out the meaning of the sentence

This is pretty much the same process I used to learn english when I was a kid. Only I used video games and natives on forums instead of an english course.

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I’ve been using Duolingo for Japanese and at the level I’m at it’s not even providing any more explanations. It’s just “here’s some phrases, remember them”. The now locked comments sections (which is where the real learning seems to happen making it all the more frustrating that they disabled this functionality) is filled with complaints about the same.

It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

It was fun to start but now it’s become increasingly frustrating with its focus on remembering things without understanding them. I definitely don’t see myself renewing my subscription when it runs out later this year.

I agree. It's probably better to switch to more complete material once you're advanced enough. What unit are you at? I'm at unit 19. Just want to get an idea of when that transition is gonna happen.

> It also has a really aggravating focus on idiomatic translations for phrases that don’t really map to the real meanings.

I agree with you there. I suppose that's a problem inherent to any "translation based" learning?

In any case I do make an effort to avoid that problem. I try to understand sentences mentally without translating them at all. I look up the words and kanji and study their etymology. I even tried to study the individual components of each kanji, figuring that there was some logic to them, but I'm told that's a dead end more often than not.

> Duolingo has brief explanations of the grammar for each unit.

Last time I checked, those were only available through their website, not on mobile.

They're definitely available on mobile. There's a textbook icon next to each unit. I just opened my course, I'm at unit 19. The guidebook explains how to ask someone not to do something in japanese: verb nai de kudasai. There's also key phrases for shopping at convenience stores and talking about classes.

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