Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

blog.duolingo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 250 posts

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#31

Post by dimatura »

Laaas wrote: post #27
mzs wrote: post #10

Just take a look at how poorly the bot does for Spanish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577

What is wrong with the example? Although I am not a Spanish speaker, naively it looks fine. The pronunciations written in English are very impressive and do indeed sound somewhat like the corresponding Spanish words (albeit of course incorrect! But most people don't know IPA).

Like many current LLM results, they're impressive considering the SOTA of ML until recently, but not very good in comparison to a good human baseline.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#33

Post by tomp »

codetrotter wrote: post #17
wahnfrieden wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irresponsible to give this to learners

My girlfriend is Spanish. I don’t think her family would be impressed if I were to pronounce “gracias” as “grassy ass” xD

What's wrong with it? I'm a native speaker of neither, but they do sound similar (of course, gracias being pronounced South American style, not Spanish style). Except the fact that Spanish and English "r" differ, but I think it's reasonable for English speakers to know that, once they learn to pronounce Spanish "r".

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#34

Post by Laaas »

dimatura wrote: post #31
Laaas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with the example? Although I am not a Spanish speaker, naively it looks fine. The pronunciations written in English are very impressive and do indeed sound somewhat like the corresponding Spanish words (albeit of course incorrect! But most people don't know IPA).

Like many current LLM results, they're impressive considering the SOTA of ML until recently, but not very good in comparison to a good human baseline.

What example English words would you give as a guide for pronouncing the words?

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#36

Post by netrus »

crazygringo wrote: post #30
beezlewax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much what it sounds like

No, the "a" vowels are totally different. "Grassy" and "ass" have the vowel in "bat". "Gracias" has the vowel in "bot".

Bot is a problematic example, as it has many different pronunciations depending on meaning and region. But non on the common pronunciations have an 'a' (IPA), like Gracias.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#38

Post by ask_b123 »

codetrotter wrote: post #17
wahnfrieden wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irresponsible to give this to learners

My girlfriend is Spanish. I don’t think her family would be impressed if I were to pronounce “gracias” as “grassy ass” xD

They'd certainly not be impressed; they would understand though.

I just played that sentence in google translator and it sounds like a beginner Spanish speaker that still gets confused by tonic syllables.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#39

Post by bayesian_horse »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #25
lsllc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Super Duolingo is pretty good. Dropping the Ads alone is totally worth the subscription if you're a daily user (it's the only app I use daily aside from Messages, Email etc). I'm very curious about Max though ... the explain your answer is something I'm really interested in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing (which is where I make most of my blunders!).

>the explain your answer is something I'm really interested in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing They used to have an army of native-speaking volunteers to do this for free in the comments. I guess this is why they turned those off.

Usually that decision is driven by the cost of moderating/deleting abusive content quickly enough in order to not get banned from use in schools...

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#40

Post by dotancohen »

bundze wrote: post #37

I've been successfully using ChatGPT for learning German in the last month or so. It does a great job enriching my plain B1 level sentences with some fancy verbs or adjectives and pointing out my mistakes.

How does that work? Do you just tell it that you are learning and to correct your mistakes, then converse with it in German? Does it infer your German level from your own chats with it?
Post reply on HN