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 33 of 55 11 January 2012 at 3:33am | IP Logged |
Now 624 points/48 sentences in Spanish. I have figured out how to see all the contributors for some of the web pages that I have been translating. There are so far up to 16 contributors per sentence. You can see who contributed each suggested translation and what score that translation received from other contributors. You can also see the whole translated web page. The ones I looked at still have some errors but they look better than machine translation would probably have done. Very interesting. This is human cloud processing translation as opposed to machine statistical translation, or some other method. I wonder how DuoLingo feels things are going so far.
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Birddog Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 5511 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish
| Message 34 of 55 11 January 2012 at 8:26am | IP Logged |
Thanks for the updates tommus, always interested to read them.
Birddog
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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 35 of 55 16 January 2012 at 2:13am | IP Logged |
Spanish Level 4. 744 skill points and 70 sentences translated. Finished Possessives and started Clothing. Things are getting more challenging because a) the material is getting more complex and b) the DuoLingo lessons aren't quite as smooth and accurate as earlier. Some perfectly correct answers are rejected, I guess because there are now more possible correct answers and they haven't yet covered all the possibilities. But I have been giving lots of feedback which I expect they use to improve things as we go along. I did get feedback on two of my submissions. That is encouraging. Still learning quite a bit.
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a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5254 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish
| Message 36 of 55 16 January 2012 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
I've requested invitation email ages (read: lot more than two weeks) ago and I'm still waiting... I wonder if they will ever accept new users. I hope their private beta will end ASAP
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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 37 of 55 16 January 2012 at 10:48pm | IP Logged |
a3 wrote:
I wonder if they will ever accept new users. |
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I have received three responses to my feedback to them within DuoLingo. I'll ask them for some information such as waiting times, etc. I doubt that I will get a response on that but I will give it a try.
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E Newbie Puerto Rico Joined 5638 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| Message 38 of 55 17 January 2012 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
Would you mind posting some screenshots of the interface if it's not too
much trouble? I signed up 3 weeks ago but I'm still waiting for my
invitation, I've been dying to see how it looks once you're in. Also, do
you think it would be a good tool to someone who is just starting learning a
language? Or do you think it's more of a nice "complement" to the more
"traditional" resources (Assimil)?
(I guess it's obvious you would get better results using it as a complement,
but do you think one could get good results using Duolingo alone?)
Good luck :)
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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 39 of 55 17 January 2012 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
E wrote:
Would you mind posting some screenshots of the interface if it's not too
much trouble? |
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I'm not sure if DuoLingo wants screenshots posted while they are in Beta. But I'll tell you a bit about the interface. The system is meant for beginners. More advanced students could progress quickly through the material. But you do have to go through it to unlock each following lesson. You are presented with images and text of nouns, complete with article, plus very good audio. As well, there is a very good pop-up dictionary available, except in the little tests. There is an easy virtual keyboard to insert any of the accented letters, in both upper and lower case. You are asked to translate short L2 sentences into English, and from English into L2. You are asked to write in L2 the sentence that is said in audio. And you are asked to repeat and record in L2 audio what you hear in L2 audio and see as L2 text. And everything is graded as correct or incorrect, or almost correct except for ..., including your audio and pronunciation. If you have to use the pop-up dictionary a lot, then you get extra "review" tasks to complete. If the system doesn't like your audio, you have to keep repeating it until you get it right. The L2 system audio is always available to you at this stage. The lessons are structured in a tree that you can see any time, showing where you are and what is ahead. There are basic levels (1, 2, 3 ...) each with about two sub parts, such as possessives, plurals, animals, food, etc. You get points for doing lessons. Every day there is an SRS-type review and you get points for completing those. When you get enough points in each lesson, or sub lesson, you move on to the next one. You get points also for translating L2 sentences from the Internet to English. Again, the pop-up dictionary is available. The L2 sentences are in text and system audio, both good quality. As well, there is a link to the actual web page being translated. Besides translating these Internet sentences, you get to vote on the quality of translations done by other participants. After you have completed translating three sentences, you can see all the translations done by other people and the scores they got. Often there are about 30 different participants translating the same sentence. So you accumulate skill points that let you proceed through the lessons, and you get the number of sentences you translated as a running total. You can give feedback at any point on errors you may see, or other problems. You can ask questions and you can offer "insights" into any aspect of L2, either words, sentences, expressions, etc. Anything others might find useful. And you see these insights when you start each lesson. It is quite regimented. You have to follow a definite path through the lessons and do all the reading, writing, listening and speaking they ask for. I find it is working for me. I have done quite a bit so far in Spanish and a bit in German.
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E Newbie Puerto Rico Joined 5638 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| Message 40 of 55 18 January 2012 at 4:56am | IP Logged |
Thanks! From what you describe, it seems pretty good. Hopefully they will send more
invites this month, they said they would in their Twitter!
I hope everything goes well for you!
Edited by E on 18 January 2012 at 4:56am
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