Duolingo gets worse (two peeves in one!)

1. The new interface has particles attached to words a lot of the time… but they have attached them to the front of the next word, not the word they belong with/are marking…
2. OK, if it is a transitive verb, you could argue that the を that goes on the verb’s object* is only there because of the type of verb it is**, so it should be on the front of the verb, but…
1. Sugawara sensei drilled us endlessly that if we really absolutely desperately must pause after a word, to gather our thoughts or whatever, if we were going to pause after a word, to say the particle first and then pause, so particles obviously belong with the word that comes before them, the word they mark; & 
2. Some verbs are complicated enough that they can be generating multiple particles - verbs to give and to receive tend to generate に &/or から as well as the を particles, for just one example; & 
3. You can have other words after that を or が particle and before the verb, like adverbs, or numbers and counters and so forth! You can’t go sticking particles onto the front of verbs, it’s horrible!!!***

3.  Next peeve (the previous one broke into 2 main bullets for readability, it wasn’t two separate peeeves) - I’ve reached the part of the course where they have introduced the volitional (the polite volitional, at least so far) - and the way they have chosen to translate it in all their examples is “should” - not “let’s”, which implies a suggestion and something you want to do/are doing of your own free will, but “should”, which implies obligation and force/duress/things you don’t want to do but really ought to or have to… *****

1. This would be bad enough just from the flavour and feel of it, but …
2. When they come to grammar to express obligation and “you have to/must/should” do this, they’re going to be screwed & asking why this is different from the should they already had (& can’t they use that because it’s a much simpler grammar construction? ;)).
3. I’m so glad I’m learning the grammar and usage through a decent teaching system.  Because this is horrible.  There’s no better word for it.  I mean, I originally signed up for classes because of gaps in Duolingo’s teaching where I had to invent grammar rules for myself with no clue if I happened to be right or not^, and some of them were not really googleable because the key terms were too common^^, but this is nasty because it seems to be deliberately leading people down the wrong path to a totally avoidable mistake.
4. For instance, when we doing the stem + そう grammar construction, Sugawara sensei was very careful to always say ‘looks like” - at one point, he or someone else started to say “seems” & he said no to that, that it might cause confusion later on, to stick to “looks like” or “about to” (the “about to” was for the looks like rain construction, which was interesting because the phrase “looks like” and rain works in english too, at least UK english, maybe not American?). Seems like Duolingo would have dived straight into that confusion though and spread chaos in its wake instead…^^^^^

No, seriously Duolingo, let’s not. 

* I still sometimes get confused about subject and object - subject sounds like it is governed by something or subjected to it, so I sometimes want to use that when I should say object.  It’s a bad name (IMnot-soHO).  I really prefer nominative and accusative like we had in latin (and dative, ablative, vocative and genitive too… so much clearer ;)).

** and ditto for the が for intransitive verbs

*** Duolingo has been proudly bragging that their courses have been redesigned by AI to improve them.  All I can say is that perhaps, instead of jumping on the latest tech bandwagon and not having to deal with humans****,  they should have actually hired a decent grammarian/linguist who was also a scholar of most effective teaching Japanese, because this is not any of those things.  As they (almost) say in The Mandalorian, this is not the way…

**** AI can be awesome but it has its limitations and one of those is the initial training of the AI for its purpose.  The Duolingo AI is evidently still at the puppy and wet newspaper stage - or the people implementing its suggestions are.

***** Things like going to bed at a sensible time instead of typing up a blog post… or at least finishing the grammar point you were on for your studies instead of taking a break to rant about duolingo.

^ spoiler alert, I was :D

^^ They never explained why, having taught us that verbs take を to mark their direct object, they suddenly don’t (or not always) when it was in the negative… so I hypothesized that although in english, it is still a direct object, in Japanese, if a verb isn’t doing its action to an item, it isn’t necessarily a direct object anymore, so it could be marked with は or が instead of を…   But I had no idea if that was correct, and googling on verbs and negative and を and は and が just got lots of articles about は and が and を… and nothing saying it was ok to switch in the negative or why…^^^ It was the first question I asked at my first tutor session at JCCC - we had been told that they were available and free and could get us extra credit for attending, but to actually have questions, don’t just go for the extra credit and waste their time… (phrased nicer than that, but that was the effect).  So I instantly thought “I know what question I have! :D” I had started studying hiragana and katakana in January, and this was now June and week 1 of the course, so I did have some tiny slack to be asking questions that weren’t quite on topic for the stage of the course at that point…^^^^ 

^^^ which does raise the interesting question of “are transitive verbs no longer transitive when they are negative?”  (& the corollary of “if not, why not?” I mean, if we go the plain route, we have conjugated it to be able to accept a nai on the end and we can now conjugate it like an i adjective, so maybe it’s not really a verb anymore, so it wouldn’t have to be a transitive verb… but that feels like a bit of a reach.  Although you could argue the same for the polite case and that masen makes it a na adjective, so we have to put deshita on for past tense… so again, we’re not a transitive verb (no clue why masu doesn’t have that effect though… told you this was a bit of a reach.  Fun to ponder about though… ;)). 

^^^^ Questions about why I sometimes write hiragana mirrored (even now), and why there were a couple of groups of two or three hiragana that I kept confusing for each other even though they aren’t that similar… even though as far as I know, I have never had dyslexia issues like that with reading and writing english are probably a wee bit out of scope for the tutors… although I find it interesting. 

^^^^^ I am skipping writing about my other peeve about them changing the course when you are part way through it, rearranging grammar and vocabulary so you suddenly hit completely new words or grammar with no introduction to easily learn them - nor the fact that for no reason on earth whatsoever, they stripped almost all of the kanji out!!!  I have no idea why they removed them, it’s a right pain, having to re-attune my brain to look for words in hiragana that I had been happily reading in kanji on Duolingo for over a year!  It’s slower and harder to read and doesn’t replicate the real environment at all, it’s insane!  I have no idea what they think they are doing, but it isn’t good!  OK, that was two extra peeves… I need to stop now.