Japanese course AI words translation ruined everything
Honestly, in 2026, I can’t recommend Duolingo to anyone for learning Japanese anymore. The devs literally killed the app by replacing all the hand-crafted, verified content with AI-generated garbage. Sure, there used to be occasional pronunciation glitches before—like when a word used an Onyomi kanji reading, but the text-to-speech engine read it as Kunyomi, making it sound like total nonsense. But that was rare enough to pass on. Now, though, they’ve outsourced all the word-in-sentence translations to AI, and it completely broke everything.
The AI has zero context for the specific exercise and no clue what words are actually available in the user's word bank. As a result, it spits out translations that are either completely irrelevant (and therefore useless) or straight-up mixes up words. And if you actually trust the AI, you just get flagged for an error.
Here’s a perfect example: a lesson introduces a new word, "hand" (te), written in hiragana. The student has never seen it before and obviously can’t answer correctly without checking the hint. Duolingo tells them that this new word means "and". Now, te-grammar is used as a connector in certain contexts, but the student hasn't even covered that yet. Plus, without a preceding word, it literally cannot mean "and". But the student has no choice but to trust the app and use the translation they were given. They don’t know it’s absolute nonsense... And of course, by pure coincidence, the word bank actually includes "and". So the student memorizes the wrong meaning, follows the app's own instructions, and still gets the answer wrong. Trust in the app is completely shattered.
In the pre-AI era, translations were done by hand. The curriculum creators knew for a fact that if "hand" had to be written in kana for a lesson, they did it simply to make things easier for the learner, and it still meant "hand"—even if it looked identical to the grammatical te connector. Back then, you could be sure the translation was correct because it was manually tailored to that specific context.
When you open a learning app, you expect it not to lie to you or trip you up at every step. But that’s exactly what’s happening now. And these aren’t isolated incidents; it’s everywhere. About 50% of all hints and translations now have absolutely nothing to do with the actual tasks. That’s not just bad; it’s a dealbreaker. It’s enough to make you completely drop Duolingo as a learning source. Because now, with a 50/50 chance, you’re either learning nothing or memorizing wrong information, which means you’ll have to spend a long time unlearning those bad habits later. Here is just another example of how AI slop turns a perfectly functional system into something completely unusable.
P.S. Their new feature with AI grammar explanations is also a massive trainwreck. It gives you rules and translations you haven't learned (or shouldn't even know yet), or tries to backtrack and explain a correct answer with completely wrong logic.