I had to answer "He is a nurse" over on Duolingo, but the only word for nurse I knew was… - Feed Post by mog86uk

• 
  Unlucky

  on Duolingo, can we learn Japanese ?

  July 30, 2015 at 4:52pm
• 
  mog86uk

  There's no proper Japanese course yet. However, if you set the site language to 日本語 there is an English course. ;-)
  
  I'm not the only person who has thought of using this to learn Japanese. It seems many other people are already doing this too. This isn't quite as good as an official Japanese course would be, but it is very close to as good.
  
  You will need to have at least a basic level of Japanese to be able to navigate the site though, since it is all written in Japanese. But if you have used Duolingo before in your native language, you should be able to figure it out easily anyway.
  
  I recommend to change the 設定 (settings) and turn off the マイク (mic) and スピーカー(audio) options. Otherwise you will encounter questions where both the question and answer are in English. If English isn't your native language and you don't mind learning a bit of English on the side, then I guess it would work better to leave them turned on. ^^
  
  I've nearly completed all the lessons on that course. There are 295 lessons in total, and more than 10 sentences for each lesson. So by the end of the course you will have typed something like 4000 sentence in Japanese (or translated the Japanese sentences into English).
  
  For learning improving Japanese sentence composition in a fun way, doing this Duolingo course is the best thing I've found for that. ^^

  July 30, 2015 at 7:11pm
• 
  HanaJun

  Good to know that. I was suspecting there is different word for male since 婦 definitely referring to woman.

  July 30, 2015 at 9:23pm
• 
  mog86uk

  Haha, yeah. I thought it would be funny if Duolingo accepted 婦 for that sentence. That's why I tried it without trying to look up other words, just to see what happened.
  
  One of the questions I encountered after this one was "Is there a nurse here?".
  
  It said the main answer it expected was:
  ここに看護師がいますか?
  
  But it acccepted the sentence I typed as a correct alternative answer:
  ここに看護婦がいますか。
  
  I like that it let me answer with 婦 for this one. I need a nurse, but if they're not female then 'no thanks'! Although I guess there are legitimate reasons why someone might say that, not the Ken Shimura kind of reason. Haha. ^^

  July 30, 2015 at 10:02pm