日本語が好きです

You may recall over the past few months when I've talked about a couple of language learning services, specifically Duolingo and Memrise. Both are good, but I've been particularly enjoying the additional variety that the latter offers — so much so that I decided to take advantage of a 50% off annual subscription fees offer and sign up for a year of the service's "Pro" offering.

While the service isn't perfect — for some reason the Pro variant of the Japanese course repeats a lot of content and seems very hesitant to actually teach me new words and phrases unless I specifically tell it to — the fact that it provides a number of different ways to learn besides that which is offered with the free account makes daily study sessions much more varied and interesting.

So what does Pro actually offer? Well, let's take a brief look at each component.

Besides the standard "learn new words, review those words, speed review those words" that a free account offers, another few variants on reviewing what you've learned are offered in the form of "Learn with Locals", "Difficult Words" and "Listening Skills".

Learn with Locals is occasionally incorporated into the standard learning/review process in the form of questions that make use of a short video clip of a Japanese person saying a phrase or full sentence. Learn with Locals simply gives you an entire sequence of these questions, tasking you with either transcribing what they say or translating its meaning into English. It's a nice distinction from the dry, careful pronunciation heard elsewhere in the course, and encourages you to be mindful of things like accents and the fact that "real people" speak more quickly or blend words together.

"Difficult Words" is essentially the same as the standard review process, but focuses on the words that you've previously struggled with — either by getting questions wrong, or using the "Show Answer" function to skip that question and remind yourself of what it should actually be. This is a good way to focus specifically on the trickier aspects rather than padding things out with things you're well familiar with.

"Listening Skills" removes most of the reading side of things from the equation altogether in favour of either asking you to translate something you can only hear, not read, or picking the correct audio clip to match the provided meaning. Not having to get hung up on individual characters is a good way of familiarising yourself with how various words and phrases work; because, as an English speaker, Japanese text doesn't look like it has a lot to do with how it sounds, it can be good to focus on one aspect or the other.

There are also two "bot" exercises you can do — Chatbots and Grammarbots. In both instances, these take the form of a virtual text messaging session; in the former, you're generally tasked with providing the correct responses or Japanese words for a real-world context such as asking for directions, while in the latter you're drilled on structures such as using "~か" to turn sentences into questions, or "~せん" to negate verbs. These are good, but there aren't enough of them; there only seem to be one or two of each for the whole course, so you repeat them a lot. And while Memrise is based around securing things in your long-term memory through repetition, you can have a little too much of a good thing!

I've found that Memrise has helped my confidence with Japanese enormously. It throws you into using kanji alongside hiragana and katakana even quicker than Duolingo does, and you might be surprised how quickly you start to recognise and understand the characters. I still don't think I'd feel particularly confident writing kanji with a pen, but I am getting to a point where I can recognise the characters enough to be able to use the Japanese keyboard setting on the computer and pick the right option.

Is Pro worth it? Hmm, I'm not sure. I don't think it's worth its full price, for sure, as the additional content offered over and above the free plan doesn't feel quite fleshed out enough. At 50% off for the year (about $30), I'm happy with what it offers, though, and I fully intend to keep up my daily studies!