For Korean, is pretty good, though it’s not very “game” oriented. I’d imagine there’s a lot of other resources for Japanese learners, but I’m not too familiar with them. I think Lingodeer is one of the better options out there, other than maybe getting a flashcard app like Anki and either making your own cards or finding a set. Later on in the Korean lessons there were occasionally weird errors where the spoken and written words wouldn’t always match up, but those were usually at least easy to identify as bugs. I don’t currently have it installed, but I got reasonably far in its Korean progression and played around with the Chinese and Japanese ones a tiny bit since they happened to be there. “Learning tool”? “Edutainment”?Īnyone else playing (using?) these things? Is there a better word than “game”? “App” feels too general. Also, each lesson has an optional timed “challenge mode”, which is more fun than it has any right to be.Ī friend also gave me a textbook that I’ve been referring back to, but so far I’m making more progress in the game, and referring back to the textbook for clarification and more detail about grammar, etiquette, etc. It really feels like it was written by someone with a solid grasp of how to teach the language, and designed by someone with a solid understanding of game UI. And, in almost any area of the UI you can tap on a character for a tooltip with the meaning and hear the pronunciation. More importantly, it also includes short textbook-style explanations with each lesson that really help you understand the concepts.

The exercises are designed better, dictation sounds better, and the learning is paced better. I’m now using Lingodeer, a similar app (game?) designed specifically for Asian languages.

I started out by downloading Duolingo, and worked my way through the basics, but got increasingly fed-up with how terrible it is at teaching you concepts instead of just memorizing specific structures (or specific answers to the same question repeated over and over). So, I’m trying to learn some super-basic Japanese before an upcoming trip to Japan.

Duolingo vs lingodeer