Being freemium is almost certainly the way Duolingo will eventually go, too. Though they do seem to be resisting it and raising investment to push it further off, their business is currently unsustainable & if not freemium, it is currently unclear how they will make it sustainable.
Have you seen Wanikani? It's the best! Before I used Wanikani, I was struggling to learn Nihongo, also known as Japanese to you non-anime experts. I was able to get my katakana and hiragana down, and I was also a pro at romanji, but I just couldn't get myself to study the kanjis! By the way kanjis are like the Japanese alphabet if you were wondering. Anyways, I spent 2 years working really hard on my Japanese listening ability by listening to native material, but try as I did, I couldn't get anywhere, but then I used Wanikani, and WOW did it boost me up to a whole nother level! I'm starting my 4th year now learning the language, and I'm still working on Wanikani. Some people do it faster, but I'm happy with my pace. Anyways, I now know 756 kanjis thanks to Wanikani! It's definitely joyous to see all the progress I've made! Once I get through the rest the kanjis, then I'm going to learn the grammar, which should be easy due to all of the vocabulary and kanjis that I'll know. I do know basics, but I still have a lot of work left for my grammar.
Yeah, I really feel like technology is bringing us into a whole new era for language learning. At least it has for me.
I use wanikani, and I'd be surprised if this was a fake/paid for post. The team that builds it is really small (just one guy develops the product, he has 2-3 employees for community management etc), and their user base is really in love with the product.
I might be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was just an excited user. Partly because for the reasons I just listed, and partly because his path to learning Japanese sounds... counter productive to say the least (learning 756 kanji over 4 years before you tackle grammar is... silly).
Regardless, wanikani (and other Japanese products made by this small company) is excellent. I recommend it, and am not affiliated with it.
Keep in mind in that learning a language, limiting yourself to a single source is silly. Try different textbooks, online courses, apps, YouTube videos, etc. Some of them will convey grammar in a way that clicks more with you, others pronunciation, others vocabulary, etc.
Ed Cooke - the memory champion Joshua Foer writes and talks about (in part) - has co-founded a site with cognitive scientist Greg Detre for memorising vocabulary (or indeed any "word set" users create). The principle is the same as that which forms the basis of Foer's talk - transforming the information you want to remember into something vivid or extreme in any sensorial aspect, and then revisiting that memory to firm it up. It certainly works for me: http://www.memrise.com
And maybe keyboard support for 'notes' - every letter on the keyboard assigned to ABCDEFG and the black notes in between. Then you could, say, plug in a written text and see what happens.
I wonder whether, if there were all 12 tones on the Western 12-tone scale, it be more cacophonous. Somehow, with two octaves of only white notes, as it were, and the tendency of users to move about constantly (because it looks pretty and you get the exciting perceptual feedback of changing the sounds), most of it doesn't sound bad. Great idea.
Pretty sure this the pentatonic scale actually - so all black notes. It almost certainly woule be more cacophonous even if it was just all white notes, never mind the full scale.
And I think that that assumption/argument is invalid. I'm sure I've read somewhere about studies of user behaviour in, say, iTunes (your personal music) compared to on a subscription service like Spotify. The studies showed that people who had access to a limited amount of music of owned music would listen intensively (fewer songs, lots of times); whereas people with access to a subs service would listen extensively (more songs, fewer times). There was some stat about a favourite song being listened to far less frequently when there was more to explore.
