Review: Duolingo English for Speakers of Chinese(Reverse Course)

[evilado]

Today I finally finished Duolingo's reverse course for Mandarin. If you've ever used duolingo before, I can make this a brief review. This course isn't fundamentally different from Spanish for Speakers of English. Yes, you type in hanzi, and the units are divided a bit differently, but overall it's a very similar experience. There is still a very annoying insistence on distinguishing this from that, these from those on every single unit. This is particularly annoying with checkboxes, as you'll be quickly going through a unit and frequently get questions incorrect for failing to select both "The ducks drink milk" and "These ducks drink milk".

As for the chinese sentences, it's got a surprising amount of leeway at times, and is far too rigid at others. I found myself writing 这个，这些， etc. far more often than I would ever say it, just to be conservative with my sentence. As a native english speaker, I found several bad sentences and some awkward phrasing in the content, but reported them and moved on without too much bother.

Like any other duolingo skill tree, I'd say this is probably not the best use of your time as a language learner. Since I don't feel usually do any writing in mandarin every day, it is a nice gamified way to practice writing one sentence at a time. I also liked to use it as another source for vocab building. If I see a word here, I'll add it to my SRS. Since I'm rather lazy and duolingo insists that you get every sentence correct to pass the unit, it's often easier to just learn the word, rather than look up lemon every time it comes up for review.

For reference, I've also completed the ChineseSkill app, and while that app is often billed as a duolingo substitute, I found the duolingo course much more comprehensive and more flexible about word choice and sentence order.

[evilado]

Just a quick additional update: Since I don't really have much interest in continuing to keep my skill tree all gold, I've decided to switch to traditional characters to do any reviews. So far so good, since I've already covered everything once, the big difference is what I'm intending to learn, the traditional characters. That seems like a decent use of my time, getting the familiar characters in a familiar setting.