They just start much slower on this course than with a lot of other languages, because you really have to get used do the characters vs pinyin, instead of just having a different configuration of the same alphabet your own language uses.
In the Japanese version too, they use romanisation, especially when introducing new Kanji and while teaching kana, but I've never seen them mention it as Romaji.
Yes your too correct I'm also trying to learn Japanese but it is the biggest course in duolingo so learning japanese from another platform may take fewer time 👍🏻
@@arunavsingh4866 i'd recommend using japanese textbooks & studying on your own, but there are better sites than duolingo that can teach you as well. rosettastone (to name one) is very popular
I picked up Japanese on Duolingo quite a few years after my couple years of Japanese classes, and I have to say that the stripping of context from common Japanese phrases really slows things down. The literal translation sometimes differs from the conventional/traditional translation, so you would always have to resort to the comments section to figure out why X translates to Y in this case. It's not avoidable, bit it could be mitigated just by having a preface of some sort explaining these phrases, rather than cost unaware learners their hearts/attempts. That and a couple of other issues reinforce my belief that Duolingo is great for brushing up and understanding another language at a surface level. If you want anything more, you'd have to immerse yourself in the culture with supplementary books, shows, publications, history lessons, and best of all: native speakers.
I’m learning German, and what I use (I don’t expect to be fluent, I just want to know some and I’m hoping that when I go to Highschool they will give me the option to learn German there) is Pimsleur to listen and repeat, then duolingo to learn words, more spelling, and sentences. I like Pimsleur, because you can do something while you listen and repeat
I really hope that you get along with the gendering of the nouns. For example: der Baum, die Katze, das Buch.... I guess this chapter is quite difficult to understand for non-native speakers. But how are you doing?
I started learning Chinese for fun. I watch Chinese dramas and movies to pair it with duolingo, so that I can understand different speaker tones and how the pronunciation can vary from different sources.
I've checked almost all your videos for language learning apps to find the best sources to improve my Chinese. Honestly, this video wasn't as deep, critical, and comprehensive as the others. But I still like what you do, because it's fun, informative, and helpful to improve my path to get better in Chinese. Cheers.
@@ABChinese I think It would be great if you have an updated (or more deep) 2022 version of this video, since Duolingo is being the most used app globally. 😁
Hi there! So the Mandarin lessons have updated I guess because they actually have a pinyin section specifically that focuses on helping you write the characters now! I am 80 days in and just found these tools 😅
i have a separate notebook for each language i am learning off duolingo. for Japanese and Chinese I do the duo lingo lesson one time through to give myself the first introduction to the new terms and characters in the lesson, then i take notes on the new characters. For Japanese I write the stroke order, the definition, and the On-yomi and Kun-yomi. For Chinese I write the stroke order, definition, radicals, and if applicable the traditional version of the character as well just for reference. Then I go back and I finish studying the lesson in the duolingo app, but now i have notes to suppliment which can help me write in the future. After i get a lesson to gold on duolingo i write grammar examples and example sentences at the end of my notes, then i move on to a new duolingo lesson and start the process again!
The quality really depends on the course, but the ranking systems and the forum for each individual exercise are excellent in any language to keep you motivated and get more vital information that may not be covered in tips. Feels like it's a trend to hate duolingo, but honestly, especially considering it's free, it's a really good app. Should it be your only learning resource? No - obviously it's not perfect, but it will still help you way better than most other apps, and keep you motivated more than just learning on your own. (and cost a fraction of actual language courses) Glad to see you giving it a fair shake, instead of just looking for "gotcha's" like I've seen in quite a few other videos.
I'm studying Japanese and I gotta say, it's always super intersting to see chinese words and notice the similarities in pronunciation and kanji/hànzì, the one I especially noticed this time was "phone", the Japanese word being "denwa" 電話! (also 分 is "fun", 万 "man" 用 "you" and I just realized that all of these look like English words while writing them out...)
I didn't know any pinyin when I started on duolingo chinese, but I found that the lessons in between each section helped, and the constant repetition of each character helped to understand. They also eventually make it harder by saying like... is it hao or hao with different tones
I’m watching this in 2023. There is now a section that teaches the pinyin. Maybe it wasn’t there then? Duolingo has gone through a few changes over the years.
I started the duolingo course knowing what pinyin was, but not knowing the sounds it made and I found it fairly intuitive to figure out what they meant :)
Very interesting review. I used Duolingo for Chinese. I found I could turn off the pinyin if I wanted. For me, the problem was I'm very competitive and resorted to using the hints far to many times to achieve my goal. I know, that's my fault, and not the app. What the app did do for me was fuel my desire to learn Chinese. So I reached out to people I know in my community and found a tutor. She's been here in the US for some thirty years. She has taught Chinese to American Chinese students. She has been wonderful. We are focusing on pinyin and couple it with Duolingo. All that said, I've completed all the courses in Duolingo except the final challenges. (I just don't feel ready for that, yet.) I'm currently on summer break, and will spend it focusing on tones, pronunciation of pinyin, and building my vocabulary before my tutor and I return to continue in the fall. Though pinyin is not technically Chinese, Knowing pinyin will allow people to communicate using a keyboard and definitely improve speaking. Just came across this video and enjoyed your insights. 谢谢
I have a question is for some cauntries easier to learn for example Chinese or Japanese? Like I'm Polish and does this mean it's gonna be harder for me to learn? Sorry if grammar(?) is icorrect have a great day/afternoon/night
I feel like every video i watch of a native speaker trying duolingo says something along of the lines of "this is just for entertainment, i'm not critiquing duolingo" and i think the reason for that is the collective fear we as a society have of the duolingo bird
I think Duolingo is useful for learning a language that is similar to your native one where there are little or no changes to grammar rules and the focus is purely on learning vocabulary and pronunciation. If you’re learning a language that is totally different to your native one and you have to learn totally new sounds for the alphabet, new grammar rules, sentence structure, formalities etc, Duolingo just doesn’t give you any information to really understand the language you’re learning. I guess everyone has a different experience with it though!
I agree. I'm using it to learn German and it's pretty good but even then I still need other sources especially for grammar. At the end of the day it's a tool. Use it wisely and with other tools as needed and it can get you pretty far esp if you're an absolute beginner.
@@english3082 YOU ARE WRONG! My friend learned to speak Finnish only with Duolingo. His language ability is basic but he can understand and be understood on a basic level, which is pretty good for a free app: we just had an hour of conversation in a cafe two weeks ago. My friend has tried learning Finnish from teach-yourself books and comprehensive language courses but always gave up because they were too difficult: Duolingo gave the encouragement he needed to carry on and the level he could cope with. Duo definitely got him to survival proficiency even though at that level Finnish grammar is way more difficult than learning another Romance language. Of course, Duo is not perfect - what app is? - but for a free app it is pretty darn good to get you started so you can move on to more demanding lessons. If you are serious about learning a language, you must use lots of different sources: that is true to other language courses as well as Duolingo! If you find Duolingo always garbage, it makes me question your ability to use the app effectively. Or perhaps you have been brainwashed to believe Duo is bad because of all the videos on RU-vid that slang it after using it for an hour, and then go on promoting something else (they are affiliated with). I have watched a lot of those videos myself and most of them criticize Duo of being too simple - because they are not at the level Duolingo is aimed at (complete beginners and false beginners) and because they don't know how advanced the level gets at the end... Maybe you are one of those people? Naturally, more popular languages and languages that the developers speak themselves, like Spanish, are better than some obscure ones. For example, Duo has many cute Spanish Stories and podcasts designed to practice comprehension, but most languages do not, which is one of my pet peeves because I found them a fun way of learning when I'm tired of "drills". There's also the problem of which dialect you are learning, for example, there are several native Englishes, two "Spanishes" and two Portugueses and a few Chinese languages or "dialects" that are correct - mixing them would be confusing.
Honestly to me it looks pretty good to start from scratch, but then eventually you have to move on and study from other resources, mainly videos where they only speak the language
As someone who is currently learning Chinese, I have to choose randomly the uncommon words, because I forget how to pronounce it 😅 At the end of the day, you get used to it, and it's pretty satisfying when you read a sentence (even if it's simple) and you understand it!
Around 16:00 and 16:20, he discusses learning to write characters, and recommends writing them out because tactile learning is useful. My experience though is that really writing things out with a pen and paper gets painful really quick. Over the years, what I do is trace out the strokes with my bare finger on the table or any surface. This is enough for me to exercise whether I know the character components well enough to recognize it the next time, but I don't have to concentrate so much about making the strokes nicely shaped and meeting each other in the right places, or looking nice and balanced in the square. It makes learning Chinese less of a mental burden (and it won't make your hand hurt after a few dozen characters). It works for me, and keeps me enthusiastic about studying Chinese characters.
for me, i recently got a digital pen tablet so when i review a lesson, i write the characters out using that until i can do it well instead of doing the pinyin. it gives the same feeling of satisfaction as to when i can read a sentence. But obviously relying on this wouldnt work very well as first trying to write out the character can be very stressful. so i still do a page of writing the character out over and over again. But it is very good for as to not forget how to right the charcter
The problem I found was often it is easy to guess the right answer to questions because the options are all very different to each other . It is hard not to start thinking "ah, airport is the one beginning with a j". Then when it suddenly wants me to type airport in Pinyin and I have no idea at all.
7:50 I tried Duo in my native Dutch once just to see how far I’d get into it. “Have you met that very important rhino yet?” is my favorite Duo-ism ever
I started using duolingo for mandarin about a week ago. I took two semesters of mandarin in high school 8 years ago, so it was surprising to see how much I can remember so quickly. Out of all the languages I've tried learning, mandarin is my favorite. It's just unfortunate that my school stopped offering it because no one was taking it. I think they were afraid of the characters.
He mentioned once that he likes how they teach the words separately, instead of only together (dian/hua) and later that they only asked for the character with the pinyin, not the meaning (fen). They always do that. I've been doing that course for a while now and they always only teach pinyin separated, so I have to look up what those words mean on their own. They really should improve on that part because its very usefull and google translate just isnt sufficient
Yeah I’m Italian-American and started and Italian Duolingo to brush up my skills, and I got some of the weirdest sentences. One I remember was, “The woman in the purple pants is a clown.” I was like WHAT😂
Great video! I completely took the lack of an explanation of pinyin for granted! I learned pinyin as a kid, so I overlooked that. Some learners might find it easier to learn the characters faster without the emphasis on pinyin. Learners unaccustomed to tonal languages might have some difficulty without an explanation about tonality, in which case I think an intro to pinyin would definitely help.
Are you of Chinese descent? I know some people like to learn characters quickly, but the emphasis on pinyin is really on emphasis on pronunciation, not necessarily reading pinyin. But definitely do what works for your learning style!
@@ABChinese Nope. I'm Latino and just beginning to learn Mandarin. There is a lot of Asian influence, mostly Chinese and Taiwanese, in my home country of Paraguay so that's where I learned the basics of pinyin. Yeah, you're totally right. Pinyin is a pronunciation tool, and thank goodness for it! I see pinyin as like training wheels for learning the various tones used in the vocabulary. So I'm trying to learn how to speak and read without the training wheels now. Again, I think this difficulty comes from me not being used to tone languages.
@@nikolas4965 This explains it! I was just asking for the explanation/use of pinyin because it's confusing to me. I've been memorizing the characters and its sounds just based on hearing. My mother tongue is tonal.
When you test out using test points they assume you already know what you are doing You really have to do it step by step Also remember Chinese is fairly new they are still making a lot of improvements When I started it was a lot different It is a lot better now Tips are a great addition
Thank you so much for this video! I've been learning Chinese with Duolingo everyday since December and had never even thought to click on "Tips." There's a wealth of useful information there! So, thanks again. Just yesterday I was too quick and translated 'baba he mama' in Duolingo as a "mother and father." Duolingo promptly said that was wrong. So changing the order, as you did in the example, doesn't always work. Another Duolingo weakness that actually doesn't occur with Chinese but with many other languages is Duolingo's spellchecker when you type in a translation. Duolingo very often confuses real errors with misspellings. You conjugate a verb incorrectly and Duolingo lets it pass as a "misspelling." And then, quite often, actual harmless misspellings are interpreted as errors.
My brother studied languages at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in California. The pace of study was intense. Students had to master the language course in 36-64 weeks. Psychologically it was very difficult, but fortunately he was helped by Yuriy Ivantsiv's book "Polyglot Notes. Practical tips for learning foreign languages”. The book " Polyglot Notes" became a desk book for my brother, because it has answers to all the problems that any student of a foreign language has to face. Thanks to the author of the channel for this interesting video! Good luck to everyone who studies a foreign language and wants to realize their full potential
My friend, I have to disagree with you. I believe you are one of the most qualified Mandarin teachers on RU-vid because you have a master-level command of both Mandarin and English. You are uniquely qualified to teach us the most effective way to go about learning Mandarin. I've gone ahead and downloaded Duolingo simply because of your review in this video. I will also be watching your other videos in this series because they are so informative. Thank you buddy, and I hope to see you become one of the most popular Mandarin teaching channels on RU-vid 👍
Oh, man, I didn't know the little chat with others function was even a thing lol. I started to try to learn Chinese and like you brought up, they don't really teach you the words, they just teach you to recognise the sound of a character lol.. and there being no slow talk function for most of them made it pretty dang frustrating too
I'm learning both French and Japanese on Duolingo (French is for school, Japanese is a hobby), and like I think it's odd that in Japanese I haven't gotten any speaking questions, but in French I've gotten quite a few, what's up with that lol
Same for me, except the fact that i learn Japanese and German, Japanese because i want to and German for school. I am only on checkpoint one in Japanese and i haven't got any speaking questions but for German i get speaking questions in almost every lesson. I want to find a better way to learn Japanese.
I think Cantonese and other variations of Chinese are written the same but pronounced differently, so I guess you'd have to look up the pronunciations for Cantonese to learn Cantonese if you know Mandarin and viceversa
@@nienke169 Mandarin in Taiwan uses traditional characters. When people in HK write in Cantonese, their choice of vacabulary and sentence structure will vary greatly compared to mandarin. Mainland speaker who don't speak Cantonese cannot really read that. But it is only an informal way of writing used in e.g. text messages between friends. When they write official stuff (signs, laws, textbooks) they write standard mandarin in traditional characters, which is understandable to everyone.
As a native Chinese speaker, I think Duolingo has terrible unclear robot pronunciations. It’s third tone is never standard. If there are five pitches 12345. Third tone should be 2-1-4. Duolingo does 2-1-2, which is fine for actual conversation, but one has to know the accurate complete tone first. Just like for English we learn the standard pronunciation first then know something is omitted or changed in real conversation. And sometimes the initial consonants can’t be heard clearly, even for me.
Ok unrelated but I’m learning Japanese and it makes me so happy to see some of the characters in Chinese that I’ve already learned and be able to say “oh! In Japanese that’s pronounced fun or pun! It means minutes!”
I started learning Mandarin with Duolingo just over a week ago and this is my first experience learning any Asian language. I learned some French, Spanish, and German in school and between these learning experiences, I definitely see a bigger advantage with Duolingo so far. I agree it seems weird not having the definitions right away but it feels more like immersion which is helping me to remember the characters along with the pinyin and definitions because the repetition reinforces each word. What has been the most difficult though is when it teaches you one specific way to say something and then changes it out of nowhere without ever learning the new words or why they're their. Like in one lesson I was being taught to translate "My last name is Wang" so I was using Wo xing Wang (I don't know how to do accents in the comments). Then I get the same prompt but my answer was wrong because this time it wanted me to use wo de xing shi shi Wang (the first shi looks like FF but stuck together kinda). Also, when selecting the xing shi combination, that was the only one that didn't make any sound so I had to look up what the second character sounds like. That's the only one that didn't make a sound but now I've had a couple of instances where I got an answer wrong because they threw a new version of the same sentence at me.
Won't be the last time. The further you go in Duolingo Mandarin, the more you run into lessons where you have to mind-read. The voice said "ta1", is it 他,她,它? Or you have to memorize the exact translation they used because they didn't allow for normal synonyms and paraphrases, or worse, they forgot to allow frigging punctuation. Endless trouble from the stupid-ass assumption baked deep into their architecture that characters just have one reading. Problem sentences that were reported years ago and never fixed. New audio at one point that literally had the wrong sounds, like every "jue" was a "que" or something like that. Add in systematic problems like the skill that would re-crack every other day no matter how much you practiced, and ugh, it's raising my blood pressure just thinking about it. I gave up a 1 year streak because it was just pissing me off worse every single day. Duolingo is pretty great but as of 2020 Duolingo Mandarin was a flaming pile of moldy underpants.
For what it's worth, I knew almost no Mandarin before starting, and I didn't have any more trouble with the pinyin than with the tones themselves. I knew about Mandarin being a tone language though, so maybe I was already looking to associate the tones with the pinyin tone marks.
I like that they tend to read to comments. There have been several times when I was looking up an issues, and I saw people complaining it didn't accept something, which I used, but was taken as correct. Also they give you the character and the pinyin, and when you clock the character it gives you the word verbally so you can tell if it's right or not
DuoLingo forums were amazing but now they're closed - you can only read old comments but not post new questions. Major mistake by the developers, forums added a lot of value!
Faster doesn't necessarily mean better. As a Westerner who speaks either a Germanic or Romance language and has zero experience with Chinese, how else if not pinyin or bopomofo would you understand the concept of tones? Because in Chinese tones are very important to be understood.
I've actually been using Duolingo to learn 3 languages, including Mandarin. Hopefully, my Mandarin will be good enough to convert to in Mandarin when I finish the course. I am currently up to the 'Family 1' skill. Also, I am pretty sure that at 8:20 in the video, the reason that your speaking question didn't work is because I think that you may of pressed the 'Can't speak now' option, which turns off the speaking excersises for an hour. Hope that helps!
Good point on not being too picky for a FREE app. I agree you should start writing the characters too as you encounter them ( tactile learning ). And the "Speak" feature didn' t work on my IPhone in May 2021.
Thank you. I lived in China for 5 years and asked my Chinese teacher how you know what tones you use with the different characters. That you learn pinyin first in China.
I like that you mention using duolingo as a review tool, because I think it's far better for reviewing or practicing a language you're actually *learning* elsewhere. I took French 1 & 2 in high school 6-7 years ago and have only used duolingo since then. But those two years taught a lot about grammar and verb conjugation, and I can't imagine trying to learn all this new vocabulary while also piecing together those basics. I am glad duolingo has expanded a lot since I started using it, and it definitely does a much better job now at teaching language as opposed to just vocab words. But if I tried to learn a language with a completely different alphabet than what I know, I would be absolutely fucked. No *chance* I actually learn the language by trying to use words in a sentence that I don't know how to say, write, or translate. I don't quite know how to articulate this further, but there is a difference between learning and memorization, and I think duolingo counts both as learning. It is certainly useful though, and I'm glad it is so popular and so many people learn and/or practice language when they can do it in such an engaging way.
It’s kinda cool and funny to see, for me, Japanese characters used in Chinese. I know the Japanese actually took the symbols or their “Kanji” from the Chinese. I saw a lot of symbols for words I know that I leaned from Duolingo Japanese. I’ve got a 165 day streak so Duolingo can’t come and abduct my family and friends
Can we appreciate how S-tier the translation of Duolingo is? 多邻国 duo lin guo = many neighboring countries. That might be the most awesomely perfect brand translation ever. McDonald's gets fricking 麦当劳 maidanglao = barley faces work. F-tier sound match. F-tier meaning.
@Smit Shilpatul Yes, the original name is fake Latin for two languages as you say, but they had to find a way to write it in Chinese, which requires characters, which usually have meaning. So companies generally have to worry about getting close to the sound of their name, but also get characters that mean something nice. Sometimes, they'll make a compromise: 星巴克 xing ba ke = Starbucks. They directly translated the word 'star.' Just for clarity 多邻国 = official branding in Chinese for Duolingo, where the parts are 多 duo = many 邻 lin = neighboring 国 guo = country
try Duolingo now in 2024, they have a section to teach you pinyin and even the meanings of the words from all of the units you have learned and are learning, and they have extended the course
What sucks about duolingo korean is that there are a lot of kpop spammers instead of actual questions about the lesson. That makes the important things get covered by then the comments it’s so annoying
I like how you brought up the fact that Duo doesn't reach Pinyin. I'm used to it as I was taught with it as I learned Chinese growing up, but for my parents they still struggle with Pinyin because they were never thought to read Chinese using it, neither did my uncles, aunts or older generations. They all learned under the Bopomofo or Zhuyin method of reading Chinese. They still struggle sometimes with differentiating when zh- or ch- or c- are used because they never needed to "spell out" the pronunciations
Duo's dependence on Pinyin is why it won't work for me either. I learned Yale romanization as a child, then Bopomofo as a teenager, and both of them (especially the latter) approximate the sounds of Mandarin much better than Pinyin. In fact, some Pinyin letters are so far off the sounds they're supposed to represent that they seem, at best, arbitrary and, at worst, a deliberate attempt to make Mandarin more difficult than it needs to be.
Use Duolingo on the home computer. Much better learning. They are forced to restrict themselves to suit the small phone screen. It's especially bad when they give you words to pick and you don't even have to know anything to figure out a reasonable sentence from the available choices. [brother] [tea] [my] [morning] [drinks] [every] gee, I wonder what the answer is.
I lived in Guangzhou for 4 years and can speak Chinese to about HSK4 level (probably a bit lower now). I was able to do most things (apartment hunting, solving problems in the apartment etc) by myself. I recently tried Duolingo Chinese and was able to test out the whole course. Reflections: some of the options where obviously wrong e.g. I had a sentence about going to work and the extraneous words were 西安 and 熊猫, I think Duolingo can give you a good basis in the language and expose you to grammar points but you should supplement it with other things, and there is a point at which it probably won’t help you much. Also, you should learn the target languages vocabulary before using Duolingo.
i am thinking about living in China for the sole reason of language immersion so that i can do business with China in the future. do you think it is worthwhile? sorry for any mistakes english is not my first language either😅
What I love about Duolingo is that my whole family can do it together while learning different languages. My son is learning Japanese, my daughter is learning Hindi and Spanish and I'm learning Chinese but will be brushing up my German and Spanish eventually. Right now Chinese is plenty and I want to focus on that. I appreciate what you said about the stroke order and how important it is to write things out. I think when I have gone through the lessons completely a couple of times I will look around for another app to work on brush strokes and maybe fill in any gaps in my learning. Thank you for your videos.
Hi, i'm here thanks your comment in the Discuss of Duolingo. I really love this app because as a French, i learn Chinese on the English fondation. So I learn a language and also review my second language main ^^ I really important to hear some native people what they think about an app who should learn a unknown language, thanks !
I think the App has some work to do to figure out the best way to go about teaching languages that utilize characters. I would also like to see some introduction videos added to the start of each module (or whatever each section is called). I want to learn Chinese & Korean, so when I started on Duo those were the first modules I looked at & tried. I felt like the way it starts with having to guess the characters & no explanation wasn’t the best approach for me, I am the sort of person that really needs to break things down & I don’t like feeling lost. However, I will note that the Tips section & being able to click on characters to get more information were very helpful. But I still felt like I needed more to get me started so I decided to stop & focus instead on starting with a language that was a simpler transition for me & that I could engage with more casually throughout my day. Since I am bilingual (Spanish/English), I went with Portuguese for now :) At the end of the day, I think Duolingo is particularly well-suited for casual learning. The more complex or less familiar a language may be for us, the more foundational work we may have to do - that is if you’re really looking to LEARN the language & not just using the App for the Streaks, rewards & challenges, lol Thanks for your review! It was helpful to get your thoughts & I had NO IDEA about the chat 💬 & comments/feedback features. You definitely helped me figure out where I want to start & how I want to approach my learning once I go back to learning Chinese. From what people have said, I definitely want to get some foundational skills so I will look for some additional tools & resources. I will also reference the Tips & Chat feature & dedicate some time to writing everything down in a notebook that I can refer back to as I go through the modules.
