According to the Foreign Language Institute, Japanese is actually the hardest language to learn for English speakers and you would have to spend 2,200 hours of classroom study to be able to master it. And yet its’s still a bucket list language for a lot of people because of our fascination with their films, food, literature, art, music, fashion, etc. Everyone’s favorite mobile language teacher, Duolingo, has finally added a Japanese language course to their app. Unfortunately, it’s for iOS only for now, but Android will be coming soon.
They acknowledge off the bat that Japanese is probably one of the hardest languages to learn. And so it took them a while to create a class because they invested time and effort and research into what’s the best way to make it a bit easier. The course will not just teach you romanji, or the western alphabet representation of Japanese sounds. You will be learning shapes, pronunciations, meaning of Hiragana characters, all 50 Katakana characters, and 88 basic Kanji characters.
The lessons are also thematic and strongly immersed in real-world interactions, since they assume that people who want to learn Japanese intend to travel to Japan and/or use them in actual human interactions. Themes include food, travel, hobbies, etc. and is a mix of vocabulary and grammar and learning things you will be able to use in real life.
Unfortunately for us dear Android users, the Duolingo Japanese course is currently available for iOS devices only. They did say it will come to Android soon, but no specific date has been given. So for now, you’ll have to be satisfied with Google Translate.
