Is Duolingo Good for Japanese Learners │ Japanese Reacts to Duolingo

Is Duolingo Good for Learning Japanese? Watch Before You Start!

Are you curious if Duolingo is the right tool for learning Japanese? As a Japanese linguist and polyglot, I took a first look at the app to share my honest review, live reactions, and personal tips. 🎯

In this video, I’ll cover:
👉 How Duolingo works for Japanese learners
👉 The pros and cons you NEED to know
👉 Whether it can actually help you become fluent
👉 Why consistency is key to building a sustainable learning habit

If you’re thinking about starting your Japanese language journey—or looking for ways to enhance it—this video is for you!

💡 Share your experience: Have you tried Duolingo for Japanese or any other language? Let me know in the comments!

Don’t forget to like 👍, subscribe 🔔, and join our community for more Japanese culture and language content.

#duolingo #learnjapanese #languagelearning #japanese #japaneseculture

Is Duolingo Good for Japanese Learners │ Japanese Reacts to Duolingo

[lifeasmiyuki]

*Let me know if you want me to do an in-depth review of Duolingo app*

[Xaphnir]

On the mistake it made at 3:10, I've noticed using it that sometimes it just uses the wrong pronunciation for what it's trying to teach you. For example, doing kanji practice, I've noticed it pronounce 三 as み when it's trying to teach the on'yomi pronunciation, and I've also had it pronounce 水 as スイ when it should have been みず. It usually does that when it's doing one of the pairing problems, such as the one at 1:48, and it wants you to pair 水 with みず, but when you tap on 水 it'll pronounce it as スイ.

I've also noticed some other things that I think are mistakes, but with my limited knowledge I'm not sure if they're mistakes or just different meanings than I've heard before. For example, it translates きれい as clean, when the way I've always heard it used would translate to pretty or beautiful.

The biggest issue I have with it is that it does a very poor job of teaching what the particles mean. Best thing about it in my opinion is that it's great at teaching a beginner to read kana.

[robertpetre]

I’ve been using Duolingo for four years to learn Japanese, but I combine it with YouTube and different YouTubers as well

[Friedenspnzer]

I combine it with an actual evening school course, that way it kinda helps getting some knowledge to the long term memory.

[DaniellaLee-yb]

I'm using Duolingo to study 日本語！🇯🇵 I know its not enough though so I'm learning from YouTube too!

[xshobux]

I agree with Duolingo is good as a support app, that's what I use it for - I do notice a lot of mistakes though (like the one you saw) which sucks for people who don't know better

[andrewfontana]

You mentioned the problem I had. I got through the early stuff pretty easily as it was just after I'd memorised the kana and knew enough basic words to understand what I was doing there. But soon enough I got to stuff that I hadn't learned and they didn't teach- they just jumped straight to the test! lol I had no chance so soon gave it up.

[tophand]

Oh god. The owl. He’s staring into my soul in the background

[calebvodski]

Please blinku if the owl held you gun point

[ProsecutorZekrom]

Livakivi did a good video on this topic just a few days ago

[GhostRevenant]

okay so I'd like to share my thoughts as sort of a mid-level learner. For context: I've been watching enough anime and streamers that I've picked up enough japanese to enjoy a livestream and be able to respond in chat, all in japanese. However, this is basically all listening, and my kanji reading is tragically bad.

When I first started duolingo, I couldn't read anything at all. (not even hiragana or katakana). On that front, duolingo was excellent for learning hiragana & katakana, I dont even think it took a week to read those just fine. However, I couldnt progress to more advanced sections of the course despite knowing most of the words, since I couldnt read the kanji. This was super frustrating to me, as duolingo is *extremely* repetitive, and not very focused on kanji. And on the kanji it does teach, it never really stuck in my head because there's no place other than duolingo that i encounter those words. I quit because I wasnt retaining anything past hiragana & katakana. Not to mention, it gets overly focused on things like including です at the end of sentences, or including 彼は at the beginning for a sentence that starts with "he" as the subject. that part was particularly irritating to me since in spoken japanese, the subject is often omitted from the sentence entirely, so sentences in duolingo came off as super strange and stiff. nowhere near anything you'd actually say.

tl:dr my two cents is: great app for absolute beginners or people who havent yet learned hiragana & katakana. otherwise, useless.

[Delivery_Boy_Roy]

I love Duolingo, but I hate that they don’t have a traditional character option for Mandarin.

我想要正體字。

[ZeroKami]

Just deleted Duo after a 134 day streak for Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish, it's NOT good for Arabic (missing a lot of features that are in Spanish/Japanese), then I just got bored doing the Spanish lessons and the daily/multiple push notifications. The romanization forced down your throat is SUPER annoying and actively hurts learning. The errors actively hurt learning. Duo actively hurts learning. The gamification of it just becomes tedious after a while, just doing a lesson to keep a streak is worthless.

[TheStupidLama]

The repitition is actually really important. It seems a bit annoying but after seing 　すし　と　みゆ　like a thousand times, I can read all those short sentences without looking at each character. It's all automatic. In about a week you can read ANYTHING in Hiragana, even if you don't know what it means. I can read stuff in the background of animes already, although I don't have the necessary vocabulary, I can at least read a lot of things now.
BIG TIP: watch "kids animes" you liked as a kid. They always have hiragana in tiny characters of the kanji characters, so the young japanese kids who can't read kanji well yet, can still understand.