tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 17 of 55 22 December 2011 at 12:40am | IP Logged |
fiziwig wrote:
Duolingo's mechanical robo voice and robo grading is just to hard to
deal with for me. It's less about learning Spanish and more about guessing what the
robot said, and, of course, about being a flawless typist. |
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I think the system is a lot better than your post portrays, but you are farther along
than I am so I may not have yet found the issues you mention.
I find the voice to be rather good, considering. It is far better than a basic computer
voice, and seems to me to be a so-called "natural voice" or better.
Your Spanish may already be advanced well beyond what is required to get started, but
the system is just testing to confirm that you are ready to de sentence translating and
more advanced learning.
And remember this is just a "beta" so far. Did you notice on the left side of the
practice pages, there is a button labelled "Feedback"? I'll bet they would really
appreciate a copy of your post as feedback.
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 18 of 55 22 December 2011 at 12:46am | IP Logged |
tommus wrote:
I have completed seven lessons of Spanish Basic 1 and earned 60 Skill
Points. |
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I have now tested out of Spanish Basic 1 with 106 skill points. This is actually not very
much progress but it just took a few 15 minute sessions over three days. I post this here
just to encourage more folks to give it a try.
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 19 of 55 22 December 2011 at 2:02am | IP Logged |
tommus wrote:
I have now tested out of Spanish Basic 1 with 106 skill points. |
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This is fun!
I now have 126 skill points and I have translated 3 sentences from the Internet into
English. When you are asked to translate a sentence, it also gives you a link to the
actual page the sentence comes from. After you have provided your translation, it shows
you some translations done by other people and asks you to evaluate them on a scale of
not good, good, very good. The three sentences were from three different web sites.
I am beginning to see the method in their madness. Now we obviously need more
participants!
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fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4871 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 20 of 55 22 December 2011 at 3:23am | IP Logged |
tommus wrote:
fiziwig wrote:
Duolingo's mechanical robo voice and robo grading is just to hard to
deal with for me. It's less about learning Spanish and more about guessing what the
robot said, and, of course, about being a flawless typist. |
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I think the system is a lot better than your post portrays, but you are farther along
than I am so I may not have yet found the issues you mention.
I find the voice to be rather good, considering. It is far better than a basic computer
voice, and seems to me to be a so-called "natural voice" or better.
---
And remember this is just a "beta" so far. Did you notice on the left side of the
practice pages, there is a button labelled "Feedback"? I'll bet they would really
appreciate a copy of your post as feedback.
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Yes, I was LOVING it, until somewhere around 900 to 1000 skill points when the sentences got to be too complicated for the robo voice to render well enough. Back at the 500 skill point level the robo voice was just fine for those simpler sentences.
And yes, I sent them LOTS of screen shots and feedbacks along the way in places where the system told me that my correct answer was wrong. (And to be fair, one feedback I sent them turned out to be MY error. I was supposed to type the answer in Spanish and I typed the translation in English instead. But a human tutor would have said, "Well, yes that's a correct translation, but I didn't want you to translate the question, I wanted you to answer it.", "Oh," I would have said, and if I can translate it I can sure as hell answer it, so in a tutoring situation the human wouldn't have slapped me in the face for that mistake.
What I enjoyed the most was translating live sentences from the Internet. Those were a lot more fun that listing to soulless robo-voice.
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 21 of 55 25 December 2011 at 2:54am | IP Logged |
I have now completed Spanish Basic 1, Basic 1 Phrases and part of Basic 2. And I have
translated 6 Spanish sentences from the Internet into English.
For me, I think DuoLingo is working. And I can see how translation from the Internet will
work too. The system gives you a very good pop-up Spanish-English dictionary. It is easy
to understand the meaning of the Spanish phrases. Then it is just a matter of putting
them into proper, native-like English. This is the step where machine translations like
Google Translate stumble. So I think that Luis von Ahn's creativity and initiative have
been masterful in coming up with the concept and implementation of DuoLingo.
1 person has voted this message useful
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 22 of 55 26 December 2011 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
I am now well into Spanish Level 2 with 226 skill points and 9 sentences translated from
the Internet.
It would be more interesting if someone else was doing DuoLingo. Anyone else trying it?
1 person has voted this message useful
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a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5262 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish
| Message 23 of 55 27 December 2011 at 10:13am | IP Logged |
I have signed up, but Im still waiting D:
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 24 of 55 30 December 2011 at 4:41am | IP Logged |
I am now most of the way through Spanish Basic 2 and have unlocked two sections called
Food and Animals. So I will start them soon. I now have 296 skill points and have
translated 15 sentences from the Internet. The last two plus the title came from the
following Spanish page of Wikibooks. Note it does not yet seem to have an English
translation.
http://es.wikibook
s.org/wiki/Wikichicos/La_Tierra/Los_continentes
Edited by tommus on 30 December 2011 at 4:48am
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