User blog comment:Damesukekun/Song Translating and Mistranslating/@comment-24.24.215.86-20190408181953/@comment-36977550-20190408190217

Duolingo will only help get your feet wet. The good thing of Duolingo is that it gives you a buckload of lessons and sentence translations you'll in the end have to repeat and learn until it fully imprints into your brain. But what annoys is that they make me speak like I'm effeminate, and I am a boy. It's really offensive. For example, they make me use "Watashi" in every single sentence, and mark it wrong if you use "boku" or "ore". But when I used the female pronoun, "atashi", they marked it right! It is so freaking comical and wierd. They also force you to finish every single sentence with "Masu" or "Desu", otherwise they'll mark the sentence wrong. They also teach you that "our" in Japanese, is translated to "uchi" on every case, and not "bokura" or "bokutachi no" and stuff like that. Men don't use "uchi", "atashi", and use "masu", "desu", and "watashi" to a limited degree. I don't for the least, nor do I use "watashi". I'd only dare use "atashi" if someone would set me a dare to use it. What's worse is that they first teach you the Kanji of a word but then, when you have to translate it, they write the entire sentence in Hiragana and NOT KANJI. I'm so frustrated with this course in some aspects. I know, they wrote in a blog that they did their best in trying to get people to learn Japanese as accurate as possible, but they outsmarted in this case. I don't know what the hell they are up to in this case. In conclusion, you can continue to use Duolingo, but just note that after you're done with it, don't think you know everything, and try searching for other Japanese courses too.