itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

The worst computer voice I’ve come across on there is the one for Catalan.

I can send you dutch sound files. However, my accent is rub: I'm from the West Flanders. Considered to be the worst sounding. Lol

Also "waarom weiger je mij te helpen". If you put verb first, it is w/o the t. For example: je drinkt but drink je

Thanks. Thought I got that sentence verbatim from Duo.

“thought” or “though”? Again, it’s all about that extra t...

Lolt

:-)

Okay I found the original sentence- without the "t," thanks. Had to search within the Duo Discussion, Google search has deindexed almost everything but the Duo Dictionary. This one uses the listless vox generator I mentioned
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/28947790

"Waarom weiger je om me te helpen?"

She sounds like a scary bot.

Waarom weiger je om me te helpen James?

Ha, thanks!

Here is two year old discussion on Dutch voices: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/14870029/Is-it-possible-to-change-the-new-Dutch-voice-back-to-the-lady

(mine wasn't recorded w/a line-in mic btw, but in a noisy office space fyi)

A good voice makes all the difference in the world though. Why did they ditch the previous lady voice?

I'm not sure but I think maybe the lady voice on that sample is the previous one back in rotation.

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/20701365
https://www.textaloud.com/

The male Dutch voice I have been used to is clearly Ivona Ruben, as stated in the forum, not sure if this female voice is Lotte or not.

Yes, just cut and pasted the new favorite example sentence and it is clearly her.

Here are some comments upon Ruben's arrival:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/15611328
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/14870215
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/15388323

Eeek sometimes the french pronounciation seems muffled. I couldn't understand what she said. I got it wrong.

The worst computer voice I’ve come across on there is the one for Catalan.

― Spirit of the Voice of the Beehive (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, January 20, 2019 10:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i was doing the català for speakers of castellano a couple years ago and gave up because the voice clips were so bad

Haven’t figured out where that voice comes from yet but I see that sometimes they use a TTS (Text To Speech), such as IVONA for Dutch and Welsh, sometimes HTS (Hidden-Markov-Model? To Speech), such as for Irish, and sometimes just a human voice: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/8859682/Uncover-the-secret-of-the-Esperanto-voice

Okay, Ruben is back on my Dutch course. Wat ruikt er zo lekker?

Wie wil er een potlood?

My kid is now doing duolingo too. Il y aura compétition entre nous deux. Elle gagnera, j'en suis sûr.

Probeerde je mij iets met jouw dans te vertellen?

I think it accepted that, although it’s preferred answer seems to be:

Probeerde je mij iets te vertellen met jouw dans?

The first sentence is in the “correct” hierarchical word order, and sounds slightly stilted, the second one is more conversational.

tbh, that stiltedness also stems from the needlessly emphatic “jouw” where “je” would have been preferable (in both sentences).

Urgh I even have a problem with word order in dutch and it's my first language! And I really need to say gewoonte (habit) instead of gewente which is RONG (and dialect).

Wonder if they use dutch pronounciation in duolingo (as opposed to flemish, which sounds much softer).

I'm at ten days now. Getting progressively harder. But j'aime apprendre le francais. C'est pour utiliser dans ma profession.

Thanks. Yeah, seems like the first word order is more, um, Germanic.

Actually just found this in German grammar book

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES sometimes follow the verbal bracket, especially in colloquial speech.

So same thing, I guess

I’m learning Japanese, which is unsurprisingly hard though I’m making progress! I’m actually grateful for the repetition so I can get the sounds and characters down.

I also have Irish, but more to improve on what I already have? The Irish woman on there is from Donegal though and her spoken Irish throws me :(

Does it have kana and kanji??? Jealous. Nihongo wa muzukashii deshoo neeee

Not sure yet but assume so. Think they start you with hiragana so you can understand the importance of syllables.

Can you switch between languages? Want to brush up my japanese too.

You definitely can - have three I switch between.

Hurrah. Nihongo benkyo shimasu!

Ganbatte kudasai! (That's 50% of my Japanese knowledge right there, so any excuse to post it)

Is the Irish course Donegal dialect content-wise or is it just the audio accent? Someone complained in the comments that it sounded like an English person speaking Irish and I wasn't sure if that should bother me, as an English person hoping to... well, not speak Irish so much as look at Irish words and make a decent guess at pronunciation. I wish there were audio clips for more of the words.

(I also wish Duolingo had more guidance about accents and regional variations in general. If I learn Portuguese via the Duolingo course with a Brazilian flag on, would I then sound weird in Portugal? And so on.)

I don't seem to get on very well with learning whole new languages on DL, though. I've abandoned about 5 of them. Still plodding away at German, and I think it's good-ish practice for genders and word order and maybe vocab too, but not sure how much I'm actually learning.

Other people have complained about the Irish content previously not accepting other ways of writing things, so I’m unsure. I’m not sure about how they teach it because sometimes they ask you to write something and I know that writing this word will now have a h as opposed to the standard spelling, but then you’ll get it wrong if you’re a beginner because you don’t know that.

Arigato!

De hoeveelste is het vandaag?

De vijfentwintigste. Waarom vraag je?

Because I just learned the word “hoeveelste.”

I love that word! Wonder how you pronounce it.

I lost my ten day streak due to being sick. J'avais mal à la tête. Atama itai da yoooo

Dommage!

Some Dutch things I recently came across that I found interesting or amusing, not through Duolingo:
The words
paalwoning and
maggiblokje®

The word order in the sentence
Ik ben de stad in gefietst.

Interesting French locution I just came across in Le Petit Robert:
Inconnu au bataillon

Another fun Dutch word:
Pinksteren

I’m learning Japanese, which is unsurprisingly hard though I’m making progress! I’m actually grateful for the repetition so I can get the sounds and characters down.

Duolingo is a bad place to start learning Japanese and I don’t think the course is very much cop. LingoDeer isn’t a bad place to start though. You need more explanation of the mechanics of the language and LingoDeer has that. There are however a bunch of tools that are way worse than Duolingo; tools that try to shoehorn Japanese into a European language template - so bad.

I agree with Ed.

Started doing Japanese w memrise (while continuing w duolingo). It's meh but better than nothing.

Het is zo helder als koffiedik.

Het is zo helder als koffiedik.