Megan's friend and Duolingo

Welsh General / Questions
#21

Also this:

I've run out of food. I'm going to eat the dogs. What apostrophe?
(Winner of a Guardian newspaper apostrophe haiku competition!)
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#22

Duolingo’s “You made a typo, but we’ll call it correct and move on” actually irritates me much more, and I think is less helpful to my learning, than calling a response incorrect when it isn’t.

Here’s an example. Duolingo asked me to translate “who” into Welsh.

I knew it was a very short word beginning with P, probably three letters long. I knew it wasn’t pam because I remembered from a very early SSiW lesson that pam means “why”. I had a vague memory that the middle letter was either W or Y. The third letter I had completely forgotten. L? M? N? R?

I took a wild guess and entered pwl.

“You made a typo. It’s pwy” said Duolingo. But because a typo is considered correct in the Duolingo world, it moved on.

My understanding (I could be wrong) is that when Duolingo provides strengthening exercises later on, it will concentrate on the answers you got wrong, not on typos - because after all, typos are a slip of the finger that even a fluent speaker can make. So treating a wild guess as a typo, as Duolingo did here, is not helpful to a learner. I want it to treat pwy as one of the words I didn’t know, and to remind me of it more often in later exercises, but I suspect it won’t.

Maybe if it thinks the user made a typo, Duolingo should say, without revealing the correct answer or even the problem letter, “You made a typo. Please edit your response.” That would allow users to correct genuine typos. And if the second attempt doesn’t fix the problem (in my case, I probably would have changed pwl to pwn), then Duolingo should treat it as incorrect.

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#23

If any of your are on Facebook, Richard Morse is the creator of the course. He’s very receptive to constructive feedback. There is a users group on there. :slight_smile:

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#24

I’ve had a few of those free passes too - but I’ve had many many more actual typos, or incorrect mutations. I think I would have given up if I had kept getting held back through making too many of those types of mistakes. I prefer getting away with the odd mistake and getting through the material as quickly as I can than aiming for perfection!

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#25

Duolingo’s “You made a typo, but we’ll call it correct and move on” actually irritates me much more, and I think is less helpful to my learning, than calling a response incorrect when it isn’t.

Allowing my many typos doesn’t bother me so much as long as I’m aware of it and see the right answer. In fact if I had to stop and correct every typo, I wouldn’t even have lasted 20 hours. :smile:

I think your suggestion of “Please edit your response” is a good one and worth feeding back via @AnthonyCusack 's suggestion of using Facebook (which I don’t use myself).

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#26

Thank you. I’m not on Facebook, but I’m sure he could be contacted via other channels if need be.

But am I right in thinking Richard Morse is just the creator of the Welsh course content, rather than Duolingo itself? In which case, he’s not the right person to contact about a suggestion such as mine. It involves a change to the way the basic Duolingo software works, that would affect all courses, not just the Welsh one. The most he could do would be to pass it on management if he thinks it’s a reasonable idea.

You and @KateM make a fair point about wanting to make faster progress rather than getting hung up about typos. I’m a fairly accurate typist, so my so-called typos tend to be genuine failures of memory, like the pwy example, and I’d really prefer Duolingo retest me on those words in the not too distant future.

Maybe Duolingo ought to allow three settings, to suit different types of users. “Don’t let me proceed until I’ve fixed my typos”, “Let the typo pass for now but retest me soon”, and “Point out my typos but otherwise disregard them.”

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#27

Yes, this is true. However, he will welcome feedback. He’s very keen to push the use of technology for Welsh. He’s often said positive things about SSIW on Facebook. He’s not tribal in my experience. Just keen to see the language grow.

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#28

Reluctant as I am dominate this forum with gripes about Duolingo (because for one thing, this is an SSiW forum, not Duolingo, and for another, I actually do find Duolingo a useful supplement to SSiW - it just doesn’t suit me as the main resource)…

I want to take the opportunity that @hewrop has opened up to ask my own questions about what seem to be contradictions between Duolingo and SSiW.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that there’s more than one way to say the same thing, even within the same region of Wales. I ask these questions only because Duolingo is telling me that I’m just plain wrong, but I thought I was right, or at least close to right. (Although I readily concede that for the first question, at least, my memory could be faulty, or there’s a subtle distinction I just haven’t understood.)

Question 1

Early on, SSiW taught me the word gwybod, meaning “to know”. I didn’t know how to spell it, but I certainly remembered how to pronounce it. So when Duolingo asked me to translate “Do you know Dewi Lingo?”, I instinctively replied, with my shockingly bad Welsh spelling:

(Truly, I am the worst Welsh speller you’ve ever met. Please forgive me for butchering your lovely language.)

I was just guessing at the spelling of gwybod, and was fully prepared for Duolingo to tell me I had a typo. But it said:

Can anyone explain why Duolingo is telling me I’m flat out wrong, rather than just recognising a typo in gwybod? Is gwybod the wrong word to use in the context of being acquainted with someone (similar to the subtle differences in German between kennen, wissen and können)? Is nabod some kind of weird mutation of gwybod? Or is there some other explanation?

Question 2

Duolingo asked me to translate “Does she want an apple?”

I’ve noticed Duolingo favours eisiau in its answers. I prefer moyn, because that’s what SSiW taught me back in Lesson 1, and also because with moyn I don’t have to remember to drop the 'n on the pronoun, which I’m always forgetting to do when I say eisiau. But that’s OK, Duolingo never objects when I enter moyn.

So that’s not the problem. The problem is the “Does she?” part.

I asked this question on the Duolingo discussion board:

The answer I got was:

Well, I had already read the course notes - I always do before I ask a question - and hadn’t found the answer. But it wasn’t worth the argument, especially when someone was kindly taking the time to help me. (People tend to forget that most people who contribute to forums are volunteers, and whether they’re right or wrong, I think we should be appreciative of the help freely offered.)

I noted the “You may occasionally… but it is not standard” comment. I went back through the course notes, even more carefully this time, but the closest I could find to an answer was this:

Note the never.

Really puzzled by this time - I was sure @Iestyn had taught us to use Yw in questions - I went back through my SSiW recordings. And I found it. It’s Lesson 9 of (what I think is) the old course, at the 24:30 mark. Iestyn says “Now for the question ‘Does he?’ or ‘Is he?’ Yw e. You will often hear ydy e - Ydy e’n cysgu?, Ydy e’n mynd? - but this is shortened to Yw e in the south. Yw e’n cysgu? Yw e’n mynd?”

So. My memory was not at fault. (I feel quite triumphant!)

But can @Iestyn, @aran, or anyone reconcile these three conflicting positions:
Duolingo course notes: “Questions never start with Yw”
Duolingo discussion board : “You may occasionally hear questions starting with Yw, but it is not standard”
SSiW: “You will often hear questions starting with Ydy, but here in the south we start questions with Yw (and therefore we’re teaching it to you because it’s perfectly OK).”

Is it just Duolingo being a bit snooty about what’s considered “good grammar”?

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#29

Question1.
Gwybod means to know a fact.
Nabod means to know a person or a place.
And no, one isn’t a mutation of the other.

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#30

Ah, so it’s like German, then.

Diolch, Margaret.

#31

Ah, so it’s like German, then.

and French :smile: - savoir = gwybod; connaĂŽtre = nabod
and Italian: - sapere; cognoscere

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#32

And to the second question, as Duolingo says “it is not standard”, but “never heard” is wrong by their own admission. “Sometimes heard” is closer to the truth, but in the South East, it is extremely common.

One of my pet hates about learning languages (not just Welsh) is when you are told, absolutely adamantly, by people who should know better, that “that is wrong” or “people never say that”, when what they mean is “that does not comply to the grammatical rules,” even though it is a common pattern.

Having said that, I am painfully aware that some of my course 1 Welsh has changed since moving westwards, because they say things differently in Llandysul, and I have tended to bend to their way of speaking. One of those things is starting questions with “yw”. So, I suspect that the levels use ydy, although I haven’t checked.

But the long and the short of it is - in this case, Duolingo is incorrect to say that you are wrong to use “yw” in speech, or that is is “never” used. However, they are right that “ydy” is a more common, and more grammatically correct (ie more standard) that yw.

I hope that clears that little one up!

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#33

I’m guessing the distinction is widespread across European languages, then. English is probably the odd one out in making the word “know” do double duty.

It does indeed.

Diolch!

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#34

And Russian.

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#35

To be fair, though, I’m not sure either you or @aran are really introducing us to the full dialectal variety we can expect to encounter in Welsh… https://www.instagram.com/p/BWkXIeGDx0d/

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#36

Loved the map, Richard! Laughed myself silly.

Even with my beginner’s Welsh, I understood them all except “Keith”. Is that a Welsh word, a local reference to a person or place, or what?

#37

I’m afraid I have no idea - I only know of it as a personal name (and it’s certainly not a Welsh word, with that spelling), but I don’t get the joke /reference.

On the other hand, I was reminded of @aran’s end-of-challenge suggestion somewhere of “a pint or two of vodka” when I saw Ynys Môn on the map…

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#38

I finished the Duolingo Welsh course. It’s okay. If anything don’t take too much of it seriously. Use it as a vocab builder and maybe a bit of practice. After all it’s good to listen and understand poor and unwieldy grammar in any language.

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#39

It’s a recurring joke on Bolycs Cymraeg. They have several “linguistic” maps and Keith is always there somewhere (in a non-Welsh speaking area)

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#40

Thanks, Anthony.

I’m also curious about jiws buwch. Duolingo had already taught me that buwch is cow, so I figured out from the context that jiws buwch is meant to be Welsh for that old joke name, “cow juice”.

It’s the word jiws that’s puzzling me. Duolingo taught me that juice is sudd. Sudd afal, sudd oren, and so on.

Is jiws a genuine alternative to sudd, or is it “mock Welsh”, to make the joke more comprehensible to readers who may not know the word sudd?