itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

No hay de que.

I got veto'd from putting "espero que no te hayas portado mal este año" in the holiday cards to the building doormen this year (not a fancy building, most buildings have doormen here). I went with the simple "felices fiestas".

So Teach Yourself has made the audio for many of their courses freely available- although the relevant app is super buggy- and a lot of the ebooks are available at $3.99 on US Amazon, for now at least

you can just download audio if you want. Best practice to avoid buggy behavior seems to be to download all at once and not track by tracks

But I really came to post that somebody just told me “¡Feliz Año, mi estimado!”

Convenience link to current site for old school public domain courses from the US FSI etc.: https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/index.html

And to U of C Bengali course: http://home.uchicago.edu/cbs2/banglainstruction.html
along with related audio: http://www.iu.edu/~celtie/bengali_archive.html

Hij denkt dat hij iemand is, maar hij is niemand.

Je huiswerk voor deze week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiTvbWMHbn4

Dank u wel!

Je mag “je” zeggen, hoor!

Oké, dank je wel!

Hold on, didn't realise you can study Dutch. Fantastisch. Moi, j'ai commencé à étudier la langue francaise. I can understand a lot but I'm uncomfortable with speaking.

One weird thing about the Dutch course, is that they seem to have recently introduced a female voice which clearly has more computer-generated artifact noise than the male one.

Please ignore first comma

Waarom weigert je om me te helpen?

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.