Revamped Duolingo: Good for Japanese (and Ukraine)

    The other day I stumbled upon the information that Duolingo, the free language learning app, was giving proceeds for ad revenue from people learning Ukrainian to charities in Ukraine.

    I figured that dabbling in a language I'm never going to be likely to use would be a good chance for me to do a little something to benefit someone out there without having to find money to give and figure out who to send money to. What I found was really surprising. First, I was glad to see that the work I had years done before in Duolingo had maintained some kind of value. It was several years ago that I went to the entirety of the Japanese program they had available. While I learned very little new information for me personally, the activity made for good practice. However, I stopped having interest in it when I got to the end of the lessons and hadn't learned anything really new.

I don't remember getting crowns in those subject, because I don't remember it being set up quite this way, but they still tried to translate my previous progress to their current system.

    My progress from my previous study had been saved, even as the program had been revamped and added to. I consider it pretty elevated compared to where it was before, though my friends who are studying at the lower levels of Japanese still inform me that Duolingo is forcing personal pronouns in sentences that generally would not have them in spoken Japanese. Still, when I picked up a random later unit, I found some kanji that I have never seen before. It may well be a common kanji that I personally have yet to study, but still it was something new and that was intriguing.

That they have.

    I'm still keeping up with studying Ukrainian as well, and honestly find it kind of refreshing. Studying without the intent to show off or completely master the language is really freeing in a way. I'm excited to be learning as a weird way to benefit people in danger, but it's also great to finally have some use for the one semester of Hellenistic Greek I took in college as some letters in Ukranian relate to their sounds in a similar way. It's been a really positive learning experience and getting back to the habit of studying any kind of language helps me. Will it make me immediately fluent? Of course not. But popping into my Japanese section every once in awhile and continuing on with the basics in Ukrainian gives my brain a great workout and since Duolingo is a better game than before, it doesn't really feel like work.

    If you're an intermediate Japanese learner who exhausted Duolingo years back or just someone who wants to try to help Ukraine, Duolingo might be something good to check out.