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Duolingo: Translate the Internet | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 1 of 55 05 December 2011 at 2:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Duolingo is a new project to translate most of the Internet into all the world's major
languages while teaching second languages to millions of people for free. Before you close this window, have a look at least at the first link below. It is a TED video by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of CAPTCHAs. He is a very brilliant thinker and achiever, and compelling and entertaining. He explains what these new dubble reCAPTCHAs are and what they are achieving. And he explains Duolingo. The video is really worth watching. Whether it will work? What do you think? http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=cQl6jUjFjp4 http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/duolin go/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4863 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 55 05 December 2011 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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That sounds very exciting. And it seems to make a lot of sense. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5558 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 55 07 December 2011 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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That does look interesting, and I still can hardly believe the timescales they were suggesting (errr... translate the whole of the English web into Spanish in 80 hrs... or was it just wikipedia ? either way it sounded potentially impressive)
Presumably if there were enough users, it could actually work almost instantaneously like google translate. It would be great to type in a sentence, and then see all the attempts flashing up, which would gradually merge into the definative text. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4863 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 55 08 December 2011 at 1:08am | IP Logged | ||
I believe that their reasoning is faulty. Assuming, as they apparently do, that they are starting out with beginners in the language, there are large chunks of the web that would need more advanced students to translate, but how advanced can a student become in 80 hours? They seem to be assuming that each and every student will advance just as quickly as they need to have them advance to keep translating at that pace. In real life you are likely to get the simplest 20% translated very quickly, the median 60% translated more slowly, and the last, most difficult 20% translated very slowly since it will take a long time for the new beginners to become proficient enough to handle that high-level 20%. There is also the drop-out factor. Students may start out very interested and motivated, but drop out before getting much beyond early intermediate level. Then you will end up with a very large supply of beginners, a handful of intermediates, and almost no advanced students at all. So in reality that high-end 20% of really difficult text might never get translated at all. This is all just hypothesizing off the top of my head, of course. --gary Edited by fiziwig on 08 December 2011 at 1:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 5 of 55 19 December 2011 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have just received my invitation to become a participant in Duolingo. It is just
getting started in "beta" testing mode and you have to request an invitation. I expect everyone who asks will soon receive an invitation now that they have gotten started in Spanish and German, with Italian, French and Chinese coming soon. It was only a couple of weeks from when I applied that I got an invitation. I started in Spanish. At the beginning you have to work your way through a very basic course to either confirm your ability in the language or learn the basics of the language. It is very thorough and very well thought out. It has basic words and sentences with articles, nouns and verbs. You do both reading, writing, listening and speaking (via your microphone). Your responses, including your speaking, are evaluated. You are graded and then you move on to the next lesson. It looks like there will be ever-increasing levels until you reach a proficiency that will enable you to begin to contribute by (in this case, translating parts of the Internet from Spanish into English). Duolingo has a good feel to it. It seems to be high quality. I think it is probably going to work with its dual purpose of translating (at least parts of) the Internet and teaching languages. I think it would appeal to many HTLAL members. Give it a try. It is free. It is easy, and it is fun. http://duolingo.com/ Edited by tommus on 19 December 2011 at 6:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4863 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 55 20 December 2011 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just started doing the lessons this morning. It looks really good so far. I've also translated 5 live sentences from the web so far. :)
My advice to anyone who wants to try this: 1) Type very carefully, and then proofread before you click the "check" button. The program has ZERO tolerance for typos and spelling errors. Go slow. It's not a race to the finish line. 2) It knows "you all" but doesn't recognize "you (plural)" in an answer. 3) Listen carefully to the voice. In the recordings it can be very difficult sometimes to tell the differences between masculine and feminine endings. "niña" and "niño" can be hard to tell apart at times, as can "ellos" and "ellas". Use the audio replay button when you are unsure. 4) Take breaks from time to time. Don't push too hard or you'll start making stupid errors and losing points for things you should have gotten right. For some strange reason I've always had trouble spelling the Spanish word for "orange". After getting the dreaded red "WRONG" message a couple times, I finally started spelling it right, and there's no way I'm going to forget it again! It's just too dang humiliating to get red flagged on a simple word I darn well should know how to spell! All in all, I'm loving it, even though I haven't really gotten to anything new yet. It's been excellent review of the stuff I already knew, and good reinforcement for the stuff I was a little shaky on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 55 20 December 2011 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Bad news, 15:51 "they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software" -- and we all know what the leading language learning software is....
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 55 20 December 2011 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've had another look (and applied to join the beta) but I suspect they'll find that in the long-term it's not as effective as they hoped.
They demonstrated the problem with a machine translation of Japanese to English -- a notoriously difficult language pair. They then proceeded to demonstrate proof of concept with German->English, a relatively easy translation. The beta programme is allowing that and adding Spanish->English, which is also an easy translation. The video is self-contradictory -- it seems to say that you translate to your native language, but it tells us that Spanish learners can translate wikipedia to Spanish. Chinese is on their "coming soon" list, and I think they'll find out very quickly that with a language pair that different, it just won't work. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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