I’ve not seen much jp language discussion going on in the discord unfortunately, so I’d love to get the ball rolling on it here if possible :3 just set the tone for bringing up stuff about what we’d all like to see prioritized in the ~ideal free JP course~.
(full disclosure this post is long, but I’m excited!! hope you guys are too :D)
definitely I know when it comes to jp the phonetic kana systems are probably the most important to learn in full, and I wasn’t dissatisfied with my experience learning the writing and readings. but, the fact that when tackling kanji, duo never addresses radicals or the etymology of different readings makes it nigh impossible to grasp on more than a “this squiggle happens to be in this word” way, which makes it hard to recognize those kanji in any other context / words. (and being that the kanji learning feature was highly anticipated, this was a big letdown.)
that being said, I hope lingonaut makes kanji a priority all its own, and lets us learn/practice radicals, onyomi and kunyomi readings (and when each might be used), and vocabulary, all with meaningful context. I know it’s much easier said than done, but I’d like to assert that it does worlds of good to at least keep all these things in mind when structuring a course for maximum learner satisfaction!
and uhh as an additional discussion bunny, how does everyone feel about mnemonics?
I’m personally a big fan of them, but I’d love to hear y’all’s perspective on them. both their value as a learning tool, and how traditional / historically rooted you think they ought to be for you to learn best. do you think it’s the more absurd the better? or do you prefer it more grounded in the kanji’s conception? do you like using them more for readings, radicals/composition memorization, or both? let me know~~~ I’m curious (*´ω｀*) 見てくれてありがとう〜♪
connie whatever Topic starter
13/06/2024 5:28 pm
I ended up getting a comment from one of the course creators, and though it ended up deleted, I’ll go ahead and clarify just in case for anyone who’d appreciate the clarity: by etymology I definitely mean both the development from middle chinese And the radicals/components of the kanji. I like having the option to explore the “how” and “why” behind characters and words if at all possible, such as what the logic behind the radicals may have been, if there are any historical anecdotes attached to a specific kanji’s design, if the phrase was originally something else but got modified over time, etcetera.
I know not every learner really cares to know all that, so I’m not necessarily advocating for it to be an unskippable part of the course, lest it throw people off their flow or intimidate a new learner, but! I’m definitely saying it’d be a great thing to have as an expandable explanation tab when learning. maybe listed under “Why?” or “History Lesson” under whatever you’re studying, or something. idk lol
Vexo 02/08/2025 9:35 pm
@arisinnin I have beta tested the app so from what i believe it will probably be a separate tab or they might add a button in every unit but they probably wont
I definitely agree that there needs to be a huge focus on kanji right from the beginning, although I think it could be pretty hard to integrate it into the course!
I like mnemonics sometimes o:
I think weird ones can definitely stick better, but it totally depends on the person! Perhaps there could be a way to add your own mnemonics like on other sites.
connie whatever Topic starter
13/06/2024 2:14 am
@vekhove oh definitely, I love coming up with my own mnemonics! kanji garden is what I’m using at the moment even though it’s real slow, and I do love both the historical anecdotes and space to save your own notes on each kanji, including mnemonics. if lingonaut ends up having similar features with added sentence and listening practice… well, I think that’d be pretty perfect imo. I just hope coding all that won’t be a herculean task for creatonauts 😵💫
It seems like learners have a lot of different wants and needs in terms of mnemonics so I think what I would most like is editable tool tips with a default, maybe cheesy mnemonic, that the user can change themselves. I’m thinking sort of like Chants of Senaar if anyone’s familiar. I personally find that mnemonics are not all that useful unless they feel personally like an epiphany. But I’m also a linguist so having something like a field notebook on steroids would just be awesome.
Like ideally you would have a system that treats words semi-morphemically:
In Japanese, splitting words into individual Kanji so that [失敗] would have a tag that you can edit as a whole word and then also each character would have individual tags [失][敗] and in 敗 there would be references to the character equivalents of the radicals (or maybe the radicals separately, if the radicals have shifted too much etymologically or are unrecognizable), giving [貝] and [攵]. In those tags would be default values that are common pedagogically or just informative, like the meanings on their own, different readings, etc, including a mnemonic. And then add in a way to make user notes.
And I think while this might seem like too much for a minority of languages with complex writing systems, I think it could be applied to other languages like Turkish and German to varying degrees. Basically any language that compounds and/or does agglutination widely. This wouldn’t, for instance, apply to most of the romance languages beyond the surface word level.
And I think that’s why Duolingo ended up with a system that seemed to underserved those languages. They had developed primarily around the romance languages that are synthetic and so a system like that wasn’t very applicable.
@hewhohatches Btw, if you write that in suggestions and ideas, the developers are more likely to see it!
Vexo 02/08/2025 9:37 pm
@hewhohatches That would honestly work, i think it would do well to automatically add any new kanji you learn to that list so you can use it for reference
I think this should be added I n Japanese leading to be honest it’d make learning much easier, Its called Immersion kit : “Anime Sentences for Japanese Learners” immersionkit.com
Also anki integration would be nice touch.
Ability to search kanji like on jisho.org would be nice as well.
Vexo 02/08/2025 9:39 pm
@blackspectrum-0 Anki integration sounds really hard to add but lingonaut has flashcard sections in their lessons so i hope they add those to a list where you can see them, also it would be cool if they had a section using words popular in media