no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am
Recommend genki if you’re good with a book
If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.
That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong
In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently
It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that (bolding wa/は)
それらはわたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?
Should be
それらわたしのあかいコートはですか
(sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool
But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above
Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko
But again when you get this wrong duolingo will just say “you got it wrong, here’s what it should have been.” To be fair a book has the same limitation, it’s just with an app, especially a mature well funded app like duolingo they have the opportunity to easily be like you got it wrong and here’s why! And that would accelerate learning by quite a bit, at least theoretically
Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb
no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am
Recommend genki if you’re good with a book
If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.
That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong
In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently
It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that (bolding wa/は)
それらはわたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?
Should be
それらわたしのあかいコートはですか
(sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool
But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above
Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko
But again when you get this wrong duolingo will just say “you got it wrong, here’s what it should have been.” To be fair a book has the same limitation, it’s just with an app, especially a mature well funded app like duolingo they have the opportunity to easily be like you got it wrong and here’s why! And that would accelerate learning by quite a bit, at least theoretically
Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb