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Duolingo: Translate the Internet

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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 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.

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.




1 person has voted this message useful



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.

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.


1 person has voted this message useful



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.

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!

1 person has voted this message useful



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.

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.



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.
1 person has voted this message useful



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



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



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:
2 persons have voted this message useful



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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