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RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to vigrond)
Yes indeed, spanish language... What kind of real flamenco guitarist doesn't understand spanish? Currently I am doing most studying from a book but I might join the list at some point if I get active at duolingo.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to vigrond)
After i entered the link i was not able to leave the page (not even after confirming that wish various times) and finally had to terminate my connection by force to be able to use my pc again... just bad luck or does it happened with others as well?
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Erik van Goch)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Erik van Goch
After i entered the link i was not able to leave the page (not even after confirming that wish various times) and finally had to terminate my connection by force to be able to use my pc again... just bad luck or does it happened with others as well?
I think it was bad luck, but I don't think it's necessary to make a group or compete at duolingo with team foroflamenco
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to vigrond)
I never learned how to write in spanish so when I took the test it dinged me all over the place for misspellings and put me at level 6. That's bull honkey! LOL I probably should learn to spell in Spanish.......Also in the test, theres more then one way to say something but you get marked wrong if you don't translate it the way they want you to.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to vigrond)
Doing Duolingo here, but I swapped to learning English as a Spanish speaker. Why? Learning Spanish, the weighting of the questions is about 4 to 1 in favour of translate from Spanish to English. I found it too easy to guess the Spanish words, so swapped track. Harder, but more rewarding for me at least.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to mrstwinkle)
quote:
ORIGINAL: mrstwinkle Doing Duolingo here, but I swapped to learning English as a Spanish speaker. Why? Learning Spanish, the weighting of the questions is about 4 to 1 in favour of translate from Spanish to English. I found it too easy to guess the Spanish words, so swapped track. Harder, but more rewarding for me at least.
Do you mean you're a native English speaker trying to learn Spanish and found Duo works better if you switch? That's pure genius!
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to mrstwinkle)
That is a brilliant idea, you should have taken credit!
I got annoyed with duolingo. I wish it taught more verbs and common words early on. But instead I kept having to memorize a bunch of nouns.. like name all the barnyard animals, name all the fruits... At least teach me how to flirt with Spanish woman. Or I could just grunt like a gringo and point to my junk.
Posts: 1811
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to JasonM)
quote:
I got annoyed with duolingo. I wish it taught more verbs and common words early on.
Hmm. According to Wikipedia, Duolingo doesn’t teach National Spanish — only “Latin-American”. Isn’t that radically different in some respects? And what do they mean? It varies from country to country.
Likewise “European French”: there are quite a few differences between National, Belgian and (I’m told) Swiss.
What was that full-length American course on video a decade or more ago? The story-line was about a Spaniard who thought his wife had been killed in the Civil War, but then found she had emigrated to the US and was trying to trace her and her new family…
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to JasonM)
Spend lingots. There is a flirting add-on.
Duolingo isn't perfect. There are quite a few mistakes, and more annoyingly, inconsistencies. Regularly it teaches a word then when you answer using it, it decides the word you should have used is a different but similar one.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Paul Magnussen)
quote:
Likewise “European French”: there are quite a few differences between National, Belgian and (I’m told) Swiss.
Indeed, and many other subvariations at that. Though to be honest they're all fairly close to one another. I've never felt completely stumped by a Belge or a Swiss. I have felt stumped by French Canadians or French-speaking Africans.
I think I've already explained elsewhere why I absolutely and unrepentantly loathe Duolingo and its founder, so I won't ride that hobby-horse again. I do think people's time would be better spent with a good grammar book or actual aural training if they're serious about learning Spanish, or any other language for that matter. And if people want to play guessing games, you can do the same thing with a good dictionnary or any book and just a wee bit of imagination. But I'll admit I'm biased!
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Paul Magnussen)
quote:
Can it be that Belgians don’t use Si?
Ben si, pourtant!
As far as I know, they do. I'll have to ask for confirmation but this is the first time I've heard of something like this. I've met people who tend to use "oui" instead of "si", which can be fairly confusing, but never anyone that didn't know what "si" meant as an answer to a negative question or statement. I would have been surprised as well. Sorry I can't be of more help!
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Escribano)
quote:
I got by in the French Congo for a week with a couple of pygmies. C'était fou.
I used to feel bad in Africa because I always had the impression that they could understand me better than I could understand them. Then I overheard a man from Côte d'Ivoire telling a Cameroonian to make an effort and speak better French because he couldn't understand him. That made me relax a bit. In most cases, the difficulties I've had over there don't have to do with the accent but with the words. Some are archaic words (from the perspective of continental France) and some are just words from whatever other language they happen to speak. But overall I could get by. And then I went to Québec.... .... god that was embarassing. So many different words and that accent is out of this world! It was so bad in the north of Québec that I even had a hard time just ordering a sandwich or giving an address to a cab driver (actually had to write it down a few times). For some reason I hadn't realize the extent of the differences with my kind of French. Probably because all I had really heard of it before then was the way it was spoken on television or by politicians and academics, who tend to even out many of those differences.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Piwin)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin I do think people's time would be better spent with a good grammar book or actual aural training...
Ah, a nice oral introduction. Si! Si! Surely the best way to get an inside view of any culture.
I remember your previous anti-duo rant Piwin. But I never really understood how me fumbling about with choosing between beber, bebo or bebemos was doing pro linguists out of work.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Dudnote)
I'll keep it short by just giving you the most obvious aspect of it:
you know how you can translate sentences or articles on Duolingo to practice your skills? These all come from actual translation requests from other companies, who pay Duolingo for those translations. Work that otherwise would have gone to professional translators. It's taking their job away in the most literal sense there is. And you guys (who are still learning the language and have no training in translation at all) who are doing this as a learning game are for all intents and purposes working for free while M. Von Ahn and Tim Ferris cash in on your work (a particularly shameless form of exploitation since the latter is then running around selling books telling you how you can work only 4h a week if you do like he does, i.e. get everyone else to do the actual work for you, so you then get to buy his book with the money you don't have but should've got for your work for Duolingo). But this is the world we live in. When you just can't get slaves anymore (bugger), then you slap a nice interface on it and call it "crowdsourcing".
Of course, you could then argue that this is just how we've decided the economy should work. If there's demand for it, then they're doing nothing wrong by meeting that demand. And if they've found a workforce that is happy to work for no pay and doesn't care about their intellectual property rights, then they're doing nothing wrong by not paying them. Maybe we find this acceptable as a society. I personally find it loathsome, especially since it comes at the expense of what I value most: quality.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Piwin)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin you know how you can translate sentences or articles on Duolingo to practice your skills?uolingo).
I suppose that was my point - no I didn't know you could translate articles because I'm still on their basic grammar / vocab lessons where the sentences are very short and disconnected from one another, and all the answers have 'correct' answers associated with them. So it doesn't add up, if I post a crappy take of a well known alegria falsetta on youtube am I taking work away from Vicente Amigo?
Or perhaps a better analogy, since duo (on a tablet at least) is largely a multiple choice based activity. If 5 foro guitarists upload their takes of the same falseta and I participate in judging which is best, does that reduce CD / concert ticket sales of a pro? I guess I'm missing something. Speculating freely, could that something be machine learning / artificial intelligence? i.e. automated translation where human activity is helping refine the choices of software.
But you have my word Piwin, if I ever get to a less basic level and they start requesting articles then I'll drop duo like a brick.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Dudnote)
quote:
So it doesn't add up, if I post a crappy take of a well known alegria falsetta on youtube am I taking work away from Vicente Amigo?
Funny I was about to give almost the same example . I was going to say it's like if we all in the foro recorded a different segment of a Pdl piece, then glued it all together and said it was as good as PdL's rendition (because Duolingo claims that its translation are just as good as those of professional translators). But even the longer translations are done that way. You only do part of it. And there is noone at the end of the chain to make sure that when they glue all the parts together it's actually consistent.
But don't worry about it. I know this is a lost cause. And it's not a first. You can also see M. Von Ahn's crafty work in the so-called "Captcha"s, that aren't just used to secure sites by asking you to prove you're a human being but are also used as a way to improve optical character recognition software. Yet again he's making the users work for free without any choice in the matter. I know if I complain about it, people just say "ah you're exaggerating, it only takes 10 seconds to write in the two words". Which is true, but I'm a lefty and the idea of the masses working for free so that a few rich people can get richer is just going to get me all rattled up, even if it is just 10 seconds.
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Leñador)
quote:
I never learned how to write in spanish so when I took the test it dinged me all over the place for misspellings and put me at level 6. That's bull honkey! LOL I probably should learn to spell in Spanish.......Also in the test, theres more then one way to say something but you get marked wrong if you don't translate it the way they want you to.
LOl You speak LA Spanish and Spain Spanish and LA Spanish make fun of each other. The computer is mocking you!
Posts: 1967
Joined: Jul. 12 2004
From: San Francisco
RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanis... (in reply to Piwin)
Piwin, I feel the same way about Airbnb, lyft, uber, yelp, home adviser, etc. It seems the new way to get rich is to create a web site designed to get others to do the actual work while the site owners watch the money roll in. Is this the contribution to society of this generation of so called job creators? Nothing to brag about Imo, unless it's the fortune they are raking in. I look forward to the day when the actual providers of the services can contact and profit from the consumer directly.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin
I'll keep it short by just giving you the most obvious aspect of it:
you know how you can translate sentences or articles on Duolingo to practice your skills? These all come from actual translation requests from other companies, who pay Duolingo for those translations. Work that otherwise would have gone to professional translators. It's taking their job away in the most literal sense there is. And you guys (who are still learning the language and have no training in translation at all) who are doing this as a learning game are for all intents and purposes working for free while M. Von Ahn and Tim Ferris cash in on your work (a particularly shameless form of exploitation since the latter is then running around selling books telling you how you can work only 4h a week if you do like he does, i.e. get everyone else to do the actual work for you, so you then get to buy his book with the money you don't have but should've got for your work for Duolingo). But this is the world we live in. When you just can't get slaves anymore (bugger), then you slap a nice interface on it and call it "crowdsourcing".
Of course, you could then argue that this is just how we've decided the economy should work. If there's demand for it, then they're doing nothing wrong by meeting that demand. And if they've found a workforce that is happy to work for no pay and doesn't care about their intellectual property rights, then they're doing nothing wrong by not paying them. Maybe we find this acceptable as a society. I personally find it loathsome, especially since it comes at the expense of what I value most: quality.
Printable Version
I used to feel bad in Africa because I always had the impression that they could understand me better than I could understand them. Then I overheard a man from Côte d'Ivoire telling a Cameroonian to make an effort and speak better French because he couldn't understand him. That made me relax a bit. In most cases, the difficulties I've had over there don't have to do with the accent but with the words. Some are archaic words (from the perspective of continental France) and some are just words from whatever other language they happen to speak. But overall I could get by. 
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