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Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

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Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#171

Post by jakub_g »

Been living in France for 10y. I took a basic one semester French course paid by the company. It was difficult to then continue because of low availability / timing / difficult commute / price so I turned to Duolingo.

The best aspect was that you can learn any time you have 5-10 min spare. At the bus stop, a coffee break etc.

But it can only get you so far.

After finishing Duolingo French course I took to Memrise to build the vocabulary: 500 verbs, 500 adjectives etc.

In parallel, I'd read local newspapers online, and Google Translate any word I didn't understand.

This gave me a reading comprehension but talking was still difficult.

I only learnt talking proficiency by joining a French company where everyone would talk French at lunch breaks. (First one was more international with many non-speaker fresh grads, talking English).

After that, watching a lot of TV with subtitles to improve listening.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#172

Post by nmfisher »

carom wrote: post #159
nmfisher wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly. Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word translit…

Even if you just had a set of lessons to run through, that'd be a lot of fun. Prompts that make it the counter party in text book dialogues. Character, pinyin, and translation shown. The email sign up didn't seem to work on your page.

That's basically the idea! Thanks for the note on the email signup, I'll have a look - I threw it together very quickly just before I went on a plane a few weeks ago so it's very fragile.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#173

Post by nmfisher »

nmfisher wrote: post #86
davidzweig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity,…

I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly. Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word translit…

Figured I'd add a screenshot of my pinyin test with ChatGPT:

https://twitter.com/NickFisherAU/status/1598621215056625664?...

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#175

Post by mattlondon »

I have gone from literally zero Spanish to be able to understand basic spoken and written sentences and read basic signs etc.

I might venture a basic spoken question or statement (e.g. ordering a coffee, asking where check-in is etc), but not much else.

For me that is amazing. I've gone from nothing to basic toddler-level language skills just for messing about in the app a bit (and tantalisingly there was one or two moments where I caught myself thinking in Spanish too). That is valuable I think. I don't want to be fluent enough to be able to "chat with my Spanish friends" or whatever, just know enough to get by when on a vacation (which worked a treat when I spent a month in South America which was the main reason I learnt any at all - I didn't want to be utterly helpless)

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#176

Post by knorker »

Izkata wrote: post #64
alister wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surprisingly many people will not make any adjustments at all when you say "Please, if you speak more slowly I can understand" I've seen this too, so many times. If I'm speaking to someone who has trouble with English, I can automatically speak slower, enunciate better, and use simpler words and shorter sentences. But some people cannot adapt the way they speak. I don't think it's because they are unaccommodating o…

Not sure about faster, but louder is what a lot of people do when they're trying to enunciate better, they just don't know how to do it right / what exactly they need to do. Basically they think they were mumbling.

Louder can certainly help too. Especially when people have masks on.

But slower helps more than louder.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#177

Post by JackFr »

twixfel wrote: post #162
posterboy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, if you don't get the agreement right I simply won't bother listening to you, unless in a good mood. This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and p…

Well, this is one of the problems Germany has. Lots of moaning about immigrants failing to integrate, no real effort on the part of the bulk of the existing population to help them integrate, including such luxuries as "talking" and "listening". Your attitude would be unthinkable in the UK or the US but is everywhere in Germany. I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integ…

There was an article in the Economist 10-15 years ago about the prevalence of English throughout the world and the typical explanations for it were listed: the British Empire followed by post WWII American economic and entertainment hegemony.

But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#178

Post by davidzweig »

nmfisher wrote: post #86
davidzweig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to hook ChatGPT into Language Reactor (better with realtime ASR and TTS) to make a virtual conversation partner. Latency might be an issue. I was playing a bit with GPT-NeoX before. It would be nice if you could restrict the vocabulary it uses somehow for beginners, if not the range of grammatical concepts. I don't know how you would achieve that. A 'conversation partner' might be a bit aimless as a activity,…

I’m building something similar for Chinese[0]. Every time a new language model was released, I tested it with pinyin conversion (the standard Mandarin phonetic romanization), and they all failed miserably - until ChatGPT, which so far has performed flawlessly. Sentence generation isn’t perfect though (at least with my rudimentary prompting) - it will regularly generate “Chinglish” phrases (like word-for-word translit…

If you wanted pinyin output, you could use a library like pypinyin? (we use it, no complaints). I assumed GPT models performed best in English, you could machine translate the input/output. MT is pretty fantastic these days, although, you introduce fidelity issues, and an API adds to cost and latency.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#179

Post by b3orn »

meatmanek wrote: post #126
barrell wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no typos allowed or you start from zero! Because as everyone nows, real native speakers never make typos

I fell off the Duolingo bandwagon a while ago, but the SRS app that I still use (Tsurukame) lets you mark an answer as correct if you make a mistake; it's super handy. I imagine Duolingo doesn't let you do this because of its gamification -- people would just cheat their way to the top of the leaderboards. On SRS apps where the only goal is learning the content, the only person who you harm by being dishonest is your…

Duolingo gives you a pass on a lot of typos, but it's somewhat inconsistent, probably the only consistent one is diacritics. I'm learning French and sometimes you get a cloze with two options, for example gendered adjectives, let's say petit and petite and no matter which one you choose it's marked as correct, because the wrong one will be detected as a typo, but as I said, this is an extremely inconsistent behaviour and you never know if something will be detected as a typo.

Re: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

#180

Post by JackFr »

brozaman wrote: post #163
watwut wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting gender right is something any competent in person course will force you from the start. Having American accent is something to be expected and fine. Using wrong gender causes pain in listener. It really pops up great time. Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)

> Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles) For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack. In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very g…

In the case of Charo and Sofia Vergara, the accent and grammar mistakes are a cultivated part of the brand.
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