Feeling real immersed, Duolingo
Would it kill them to better represent other cultures and countries or do they just have the one set of Corporate Memphis art assets and they're too stingy to create more
No personal experience as I am not a weeb (please do not check my comment history) but I've heard Duolingo is generally a bad choice for learning Japanese.
Duolingo is a bad app if you want to learn a language, any language. Some years ago they thought grammar and explained things, now it's good only if you already know the language but don't want to forget it.
Unpopular take on Lemmy but I feel like I've actually really improved on my French in the last year using Duolingo
I trust you. But when I used it, it looked more similar to those "Dictionaries" with some fixed sentences the sold back in the 80s/90s, not really an app to learn.
I bet you're the type of guy to speak gibberish French in Paris and get mad when the locals reply in English.
Oh yes, I'm just using it as a vaguely educational time killer to refresh stuff I've learned on actual lessons
Japan sees our big yellow busses and be like "damn you live like this?"
Show
In Japan basically the kids just walk to school or take the train
Sounds nice. I can't knock yellow school buses either, it's public transportation for the kids. When I was in high school though taking the bus rather than driving was for nerds, years later I long for the bus, fuck cars.
In Finland students who live far away from their schools receive a free travel card (only valid on week days though), but they do have school bus service in rural areas where the population density is roughly equivalent to the average distribution of atoms in interstellar space.
Also, disabled and special needs students in urban areas get their own mini buses for obvious reasons
That's a preschool/after school van, which is what almost every daycare in the US uses too.
Does Duolingo still do the stupid cartoony voices? That (probably fortunately) really burned me on the app. It became impossible to understand what they were saying, what tones, etc.
They're pretty anime-y with the Japanese track, especially on the younger characters. I've heard people say it really fucks them up with languages like Chinese
It's really bad for Chinese in general (hey here's a character with no context with an ambiguous computer-generated voice! No, we won't tell you the pinyin so you can figure out wtf we're saying) but the cartoon voices killed it completely.
At least with Japanese you can toggle between romaji, furigana and off, though I guess I wouldn't be surprised if their Chinese "course" was even less developed
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
3/4 nouns in that sentence are loanwords lmao. Anglos are so averse to learning other languages that they'll just insert random English words into Japanese sentences reverse weeab style. There's no way "schoolbus" is a common loanword.
I assume you'd only hear it in translated American media. All the other stories in Duolingo feel like American skits translated into Japanese too but this was especially egregious. I wonder if other languages in Duolingo have the same problem. Do they just translate the same stories into every language?
