Big news - exciting times - finally, finally we're moving on other languages

Aran’s suggestions are not tied to particular courses. So, it is possible that these haven’t been introduced at the point in the specific course. Also, you may have missed them! We are working on this though. Along with allthethings :nerd_face:

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The design decision is that the text will display when the second target voice starts.

However, it’s not always synced perfectly across all courses.

It resets on a new item being introduced, but there do appear to be cases where the display text and audio slip out of sync.

It’s on the list!

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It is NW indeed.
(Just out of interest, is there a “conversion table” from challenges to belt colours? Or have the courses changed too much since then to bother with that?) :slight_smile:

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Just come across one in the Italian that may be an actual issue: “I am waiting” translated as sto aspettare. I had expected sto aspettando, which is a structure that’s already been introduced much earlier with other verbs.

I’m aware that translations will vary according to context: “I think that” is penso or penso che or penso di, and it’s annoying when you guess wrong, but I’m aware that all are valid and with longer sentences the SSi strategy is that it’ll all come out in the wash. But AFAIK (@gisella-albertini, you may be able to confirm) sto aspettare is just not Italian.

When I search for sto aspettare in quotes, in defiance of all the prompts to put -ando, I get just one result, and the search engine’s LLM just says “computer says No.” If I search for sto aspettando I get huge numbers of hits.

I don’t know if this is something that will turn out to be part of a very specific sentence, and actually correct in context; or a quick fix; or a more substantial something about how tokens get assembled into larger chunks.

Yeah, that’s what I’d expect for the L2 on-screen - it was the English that seemed slow to appear, but I expect that affects the timing of the L2, too.



ETA noticed after posting that tha SE was trying to translate from It to It, & when you change to English it does render it as “I’m waiting” - but it still reports either 1 or 0 hits.

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Yep, this is a fail. Thanks for picking it up.

stare + infinitive is wrong

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I guess it helps when false beginners sometimes have the arrogance to insist that they’re right :wink:

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I do have some fairly cruel instincts, but the team holds me back from implementing most of them :wink::rofl:

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There isn’t a direct conversion actually but this might be something that Aran can have a look at.

The Welsh courses in the app are the same as the challenges but the way they are structured is of course totally different.

The new courses are all about the belts, there’s no correlation between the old levels and the belts.

However a rule of thumb is that there is about 3x as much content in the new courses.

Which doesn’t mean that the new courses go up to Level 9!!!

But it does mean that there is a lot more vocabulary introduced along the way. The courses are richer and deeper in scope. And they seem to be very robust.

It’s actually the combination of your brains and the methodology that seems to work well.

The new courses are proving very effective at getting people confident and into conversations.

So, we are very excited!

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Sorry for answering when it’s not even needed any more. My attention was all focused on the Cwrs Penwythnos this weekend and didn’t notice it!

In any case, yes I confirm “sto aspettare” doesn’t work in Italian. It’s definitely “sto aspettando” for “I am waiting”.
It’s the kind of mistakes that may happen when another language have two ways of translating the same word, as with “waiting”. I guess the system has mixed up a few building blocks, I’m sure they’ll fix it!

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My daily stats all seem to be correct this morning after a couple of weeks of being rather random!
Many thanks to whoever has been fixing this. :+1:

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Am I imagining things or was there once a short demo Latin course?
I realise such a thing could be said to be almost entirely useless since not even within Vatican City is Latin much spoken rather than written (that is, conversationally; obviously priests speak the liturgies), but my nerdy heart still thinks it was (would have been?) cool.

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I remember it too FWIW. I think it was like 2 or 3 lessons.

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As a teen I was out of school for a few years due to illness, and I was assigned a home tutor by the council. She came twice a week (if I was well enough) and did her best to keep me interested. For reasons I cannot recall, the three subjects she taught me were English (her actual training), Maths (if I didn’t understand the textbook she was helpless), and Latin (she’d learned some in school herself).
Lessons weren’t exactly regular or highly structured, and I retain basically zilch.
And then I got a bit better, went back to school for a while, things happened… and I never did get anywhere close to good enough at Latin to read the copy of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis I bought on a whim. :rofl:
I always thought it would be fun to pick Latin back up, just because I don’t like not finishing what I started.

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Feedback on the Italian course so far:

  1. A big positive:

The app doesn’t have an offline mode yet and I can only get time alone at home once a week at most. This means I’m doing several hours once a week. Since the app forces you to just pick up where you left off rather than going back and reviewing (which would be my natural inclination), it’s an interesting opportunity for me to try out some of Aran’s more challenging ideas. I’m really enjoying that.

  1. A minor query: How are you guys checking the accuracy of the translations from the LLM? I’m seeing a few things that I’m not sure if I trust or not.
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  1. Great to hear that you’re enjoying that!

  2. We have a native Italian speaker amongst the staff, so he’s going through it verifying the Italian translations.

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I’ve checked a few things by searching for them in quotes in a search engine (DuckDuckGo has less tendency than other popular brands to produce AI nonsense). Everything so far - with the sole exception of sto aspettare - has been either (a) it’s right, I’m wrong; or (b) it’s not how you’d normally translate it - e.g. che sia vero for ‘if it is true’ - but it’s right in the context they’re using it in - non sono sicuro che sia vero = ‘I’m not sure if it’s true.’

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Some specific examples:

a) One of the sentences so far was “Do you want to talk Italian with you?” It’s an odd question to ask someone, so I wondered if it was a mistake or if it’s there deliberately for some deeper pedagogical purpose.

b) Two of the prompts are: “I want that.” and “I would like that”. and their Italian translations use “that” as in the subordinator “che” rather than a demonstrative (the English word “that” is really two different words). Because I have studied a little Italian before and also because I know some Spanish, I think I understand what’s going on here (I imagine that in Italian the equivalent of “I want you to do A.” is probably “I want that you do A.”); but I worry that some people might misunderstand and think “Voglio che…” is the translation of “I want that.” as in wanting that thing rather than wanting that someone do something". It might be a bit misleading for them.

c) No subjunctive? I know enough basic Italian to think I remember that “you (tu) speak” will be the same in the present indicative and subjunctive “parli”; but I thought it would be different for “I speak” (as far as I remembered, I was expecting “parlo” and “parli” respectively). So I was surprised to hear, “I want you to speak and that I speak Italian” as “Voglio que tu parli e che parlo Italiano.” Specifically, I was expecting to hear “e che io parli” using the subjunctive after “want” rather than “che parlo” since it also depends on “voglio”. Can you confirm that the Italian translation is correct and that my expectation was wrong.

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Wonderful. Thank you!

No, you are correct in this example and we will attend to it.

subjunctive should be used and

che parli Italiano is correct

It’s quite an unusual sentence and not particularly helpful

We should have filtered it out anyway along with

you speak Italian with you

Thanks for noticing these and we will clean them up.

Much appreciated

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I’m really sorry to report that I keep having issues with the App and the Web App.
I did the French course on the App on the phone, but every day it took more time to open, After some sentences the donwload starts again, stopps, starts again and so on. So it took me about two hours to learn four or five new words. On the weekend the course didn’t start where I stopped the day before but where I was two weeks before and today I couldn’t start the course at all.
I have installed the App to another device, but the problem is the same.
On the Web App I can do the Italian course with no problems. The French course starts every day from the beginning, with " the French for I want …" The North Welsh course starts every day with " The Welsh for whole family…"
I’m enjoying the courses and I’d be very happy if you could help me again.
Thank you

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