Has anyone taken, or worked with, the more formal, certificated Duolingo language tests?
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 10:34 (six years ago) link
Wazzat?
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 11:03 (six years ago) link
It's basically their play to generate direct revenue from learners - providing a quasi-formal certificate to you if you pay $49 and pass a test. It has started to take off in the US with universities, apparently.
They do it with English, definitely, and possibly other languages but i'm not entirely sure how extensive it is yet. It seems to be the direction they're going in, though.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 11:07 (six years ago) link
Ugh
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 14:34 (six years ago) link
In theory, it might not be so bad. There would be a value in having something you can put on a CV if you are learning a language that is hard to formally certify in other ways. If they introduced one for Japanese, for example, it would be much more convenient than the JLPT.
The risk with English is that it's already a market that is well catered-to and a cheap-and-cheerful cash-grab has the potential to drive down standards in the wider industry, but that is probably a niche concern.
The English one is apparently not very good psychometrically. I am going to try it out next week if i get the time.
They are going to have to monetise learners somehow if they're going to grow but it sounds like they have been trying / failing with a few different ideas over the last couple of years.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 14:49 (six years ago) link
Right. Japanese would be interesting. This guy doesn't like the English test: https://eltjam.com/deconstructing-the-duolingo-english-test-det/
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 14:52 (six years ago) link
Yep, the critical paper cited in that review trashes the test.
And yet - if you want to go to Yale, it's accepted as an alternative to one of the big three so they must be persuasive!
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 15:11 (six years ago) link
Yes, saw my alma mater was right up there. What are the big three?
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 15:30 (six years ago) link
IELTS / TOEFL / PTE Academic.
All three or four hours long vs Duolingo's 30 minutes.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 15:40 (six years ago) link
Seems like the academic equivalent of the much-maligned Fluency Shield.
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 16:08 (six years ago) link
From a purely linguistic perspective, the idea of aptitude testing a language (any language) induces a kind of philosophical vertigo. I mean obviously you need something to place students on a track that helps them the most, but thinking about it induces a nice kind of ASMR tingly feeling.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 16:10 (six years ago) link
Tbh, if you can broadly come up with a framework for what it means to teach and learn English you can test against that framework fairly easily until you get to discussion of what is meant by 'fluency' and the wheels fall off.
The fuzziness / appropriacy / biases of the underlying framework is the dizzying bit imo but that extends a lot further than assessment.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 16:39 (six years ago) link
Yeah, it's more about what gradations of fluency might be that's dizzying... like some kind of lenticular map that is legible at some angles and impenetrable from others.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 16:49 (six years ago) link
Yep, and I think the wild proliferation of scales (CES, GSE, IELTS bands, different TOEFL scales, etc), each with their own contradictory claims of alignment to the Common European Framework of Reference, points to that.
It is interesting that one of the fashionable topics at a lot of recent applied linguistics conferences has been assessment literacy, though - lifting the hood on a lot of these issues and going in to the limitations of testing as well as the mechanics.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 17:31 (six years ago) link
finally? accepting that testing has limitations?!?!!? that's good to hear
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, 16 August 2017 19:25 (six years ago) link
I stumped up my $49 this morning and took the test. It's absolutely abysmal - the review linked upthread is generous, if anything. You can knock it off in 15 minutes and more than half the test is just identifying real / fake words which, even before you get to the question of how a second-language learner is meant to know for sure that a particular combination of letters doesn't exist in a 200,000-word corpus, is rendered meaningless by the fact that the audio is completely indistinct.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Thursday, 17 August 2017 09:26 (six years ago) link
i'm shocked (not really)sorry you wasted your $49 :(
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, 17 August 2017 12:19 (six years ago) link
It is ok. I will expense it!
I am looking forward to getting my score on Saturday.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Thursday, 17 August 2017 12:30 (six years ago) link
hahaha, now I want to try! I could probably expense it too.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:23 (six years ago) link
Think I am just going to stick with screen grabs of my Fluency Shields.
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:25 (six years ago) link
xp, ILX-mail me if you would like to have a go at a different (and hopefully more robust) computer-based test..
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:28 (six years ago) link
For (learners of) English?
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:34 (six years ago) link
Yep.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:35 (six years ago) link
Will you be reviewing your experience in any way, SV, or was it just to satisfy your own curiosity?
I'm following this closely, also because my native minority language consists of just 6,000 speakers right now and is slowly declining. There's a digital course set up last year. I don't think it's very good, but then it's so so hard to get it right imo.
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:47 (six years ago) link
(^^ probably better for a true linguistics/language thread)
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:48 (six years ago) link
I can't really publish anything as I work for a competitor so it was more to get a sense of their approach and how it differs from others.
I should say that I like Duolingo as a fun learning platform - with some caveats. This just feels like overreach.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Thursday, 17 August 2017 14:56 (six years ago) link
^this
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:00 (six years ago) link
Ah I see.
It does feel like overreach, though it seems like a logical next step, to take it from 'fun' to something more meaningful in a practical way. My gut says they've a long way to go yet, but I do commend them for trying.
xp
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:02 (six years ago) link
What is your native minority language, LBI?Are you interested in feedback from native English speakers, SV?
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:05 (six years ago) link
It's B1ldts. It's listed as a dialect, sadly. Linguists have proven it to be a language (there's English reports about that online but I'd have to look for them), but the government needs to formally acknowledge it as such and turned down a request last year (it's all about money, it's cynical).
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:15 (six years ago) link
It's not true that I did nothing but use duolingo to learn French---I'd been fumbling with dictionaries and automated translators in order to read and sorta kinda write-ish French for years, and I was already competent in Spanish. But I'd never tried to learn to speak nor grasp any of the grammar until duolingo. Plus I was bold---after three months of heavy daily duolingo use, during which I moved to France for what was at the time just a one year fellowship, I elected to give my first public presentation of the year in French. My friend @ndr3w G31m@n had given a talk in French here the year before, bc he was like wtf sounds like a fun challenge, and I wasn't gonna be shown up by him! After that with daily interactions in French & lots of professional emails in French I reached a productive level quickly.
Now I need to test at B1 level for my citizenship portfolio here. I took an online one and got C1+ but I need an "official" one.
― droit au butt (Euler), Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:26 (six years ago) link
The data science guy is your friend?
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:32 (six years ago) link
It's listed as a dialect, sadly. Linguists have proven it to be a language
Do linguists regard this as a real distinction?
― jmm, Thursday, 17 August 2017 15:38 (six years ago) link
your friendOkay, I get it. I actually exchanged emails with him once, about a completely unrelated topic.
― Lucas With The Lydian F (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 16:08 (six years ago) link
No we and our families occasionally hung out when we were both in visiting positions in Paris a few years ago
― droit au butt (Euler), Thursday, 17 August 2017 16:14 (six years ago) link
Are you interested in feedback from native English speakers, SV?
It's more if anyone wanted to do it out of interest / a perverse sense of fun, tbh. This one has been road tested for years.
We do feedback sessions / field tests with native English speakers for new products though (with some form of compensation) so I will bear the ILX linguistics cru in mind if that comes up.
― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Thursday, 17 August 2017 16:37 (six years ago) link
Linguists would probably say language is more accurately nothing but dialects, and the lines you draw to divide up all those dialects into languages have no objective reference... they are always drawn with respect to some purpose, not always a linguistic one. Linguists define language families based on linguistic features of the dialects (sound inventories, syntax, lexicon) because they're interested in how language works and changes. But people define languages with respect to stuff like establishing or maintaining territory, identity, community, gaining (or withholding) government funding, etc.
It's sometimes hard to grasp since the folk beliefs about what language is are different from how linguists think of language. I'd say people (implicitly, mostly) think of a language as something that exists outside of the mind and each speaker is an instance of the language who uses it with varying degrees of skill or corruption. But a linguist thinks of language as a fiction that is useful for talking about an aggregate of dialects, and the dialects themselves are aggregates of idiolects, each crafted by one person from birth. Which gives a better foundation for envisioning how messy the reality of a language/dialect distinction is. English speakers have a tidy conception of the difference, since English dialects don't vary that much and the leap to other languages crosses a big and obvious gap. But it's a lot more common for a region to have a bunch of dialects with a continuum of small differences and it's not easy to say what "language" they are all part of. Like you have language A, B, C, D, and E and while speakers A and B can understand one another, and B, C, and D can, and D and E can... but A and E can't. Are these dialects of language A, C, or E?
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Thursday, 17 August 2017 17:49 (six years ago) link
emailed you SV!
f hazel you're gonna wind up doing so much free education its :)
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, 17 August 2017 21:37 (six years ago) link
oops that was supposed to say itt in this threadhaha!
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, 17 August 2017 21:38 (six years ago) link
Totally agree with LL, loved reading that Hazel
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 17 August 2017 21:41 (six years ago) link
the folk beliefsaccurate AND charitable choice of words
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, 17 August 2017 21:57 (six years ago) link
Somewhat hesitant to reveal to LBI that on a recent vacation I dipped into the DL course of what I presume is his majority language.
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 August 2017 22:48 (six years ago) link
Ha, echt? Leuk! How far did you come? Was it difficult for you?
― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 17 August 2017 22:57 (six years ago) link
So far just past the first checkpoint. How would you feel if I told I am enjoying it and not finding it especially difficult?
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 18 August 2017 00:50 (six years ago) link
I'd feel great :) That's very good to hear. Are you planning on using it in any other context than racking up DL points? Do you have friends you could speak it with?
― Le Bateau Ivre, Friday, 18 August 2017 08:00 (six years ago) link
I wish
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 18 August 2017 15:00 (six years ago) link
Well, did meet some Brazilians in the neighborhood recently, one of whom is half-Dutch and works for the Consulate, I think. Don't know if I will run into anytime soon, but always good to be prepared, I guess.
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 August 2017 15:13 (six years ago) link
Actually already have a question for you. So "een tweeling" is a *pair* of twins? And also one single twin? And you can just tell by context which one you mean, with the first case being the default, or...
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 August 2017 15:16 (six years ago) link
Also seems to me that "children" can be translated as "kinderen" but also "kids," but singular is only "kinder," no "kid" afaik.
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 August 2017 16:45 (six years ago) link
Sorry singular just "kind" like, um, some other language.
― When I Get To The Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 August 2017 16:55 (six years ago) link