Oh…I actually thought that the app wouldn’t work at all without an active subscription!
Curiouser and curiouser!
Just a small reminder that I am not a member of the staff, but merely a user who tries to be helpful
As far as I read elsewhere, the app can be used on a “trial basis” without a subscription – I think up to the first (yellow) belt – but I’d think that you are well beyond that point, judging from the material you quote.
Paging @rich and @Deborah-SSi for more (official) help and information
If you don’t have a subscription, the app works up to Orange Belt, then starts giving you repetition of earlier phrases. Is that your case @Cetra?
FWIW and acknowledging that I might be wrong, I honestly don’t think it’s likely to cause confusion in that direction in Italian either. I’ve never made this mistake myself in Italian or any other language I’ve studied (although I might have made the opposite mistake in some languages, see below!), I’ve never heard anyone make this mistake and it doesn’t fit with the error patterns I’ve seen from my students of English over the years.
The other direction, though, does seem like a mistake someone might make. At least that’s my intuition. It’s very unintuitive to take a word meaning “very”, “much” or “very much” and make it into a word meaning “truly”; but it’s quite tempting to do it the other way round, for reasons that I haven’t quite figured out how to put into words yet.
…which is how ‘very’ (from Old French meaning ‘real’, ‘true’, vrai) came to have its modern meaning.
ETA and also how many people use ‘literally’, no matter how often other people tell them not to!
And you are being incredibly helpful. I’m honestly sorry if I was sticking my nose in where it wasn’t needed. As someone who definitely wants to refresh my German at some point, I appreciate your hard work.
My opinion genuinely is still what I said above; but I’m definitely very far from being sure that I’m right and you’re wrong. I think about these issues a lot as my hobby is learning languages and my job is teaching a language (English); but in a decade of teaching English, I’ve been wrong about this kind of stuff more times than I care to think about.
Also, as I said before, the late Michel Thomas did it your way and I would put him in the top 3 or 4 teachers I admire, so I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turns out you are right.
The thing is that you’re so helpful and its so nice to get such speedy and helpful advice that its as if you are the go-to person! Sorry if I’ve become a pest!
That’s not it at all, it’s just that for some questions I simply may not be the most qualified person. Dyna i gyd
Yes, thats it then! I just offered to help with the beta testing!
@Hendrik I’m more and more coming round to your POV. The app just reviewed an Italian sentence meaning “What do you want me to do?” using the prompt, “What do you want that I do?”
It does seem to be the case that the more literal prompts are preferred to the more natural prompts for pedagogical reasons. I think I’m going to have to concede this one.
Although I’m not sure everything is as it should be? @Deborah-SSi
I’ve gotten as far as an orange belt and that appears to be after the pay threshold?
I’m guessing here, but maybe having completed all the yellow belt material earns you the orange belt, but you have no access to orange belt level material without paying?
That is, you start off with a white belt, before you do any learning at all. When you’ve finished the white belt material you earn a yellow belt and then do the yellow material. You’ve now finished all the yellow belt material, therefore you get an orange belt, ready to start the orange learning material… and to do that, you need a subscription.
If I’m right, you won’t be getting any more new words now, or earning a white stripe on your orange belt, until you subscribe.
It’s a minor gripe, but it would be nice if “belt levels explained” contained an actual explanation and not just a list of colours. How long does it take to earn each belt? What skills will you learn for each belt? You know, things like that. Rough CEFR level equivalency would be very popular I’m sure, but not essential.
Is earning a belt based on the time we spend using the app, or material covered, or some combination?
It feels as though at least the early belts come very quickly, but assuming it mirrors martial arts style belt systems, later belts will take longer? That’s a guess, based on the fact my random web surfing has given me a whole lot of useless knowledge. If I didn’t already know it…
These kinds of questions are going to keep coming up.
I agree with that. The app and the method are ace, but I think it would be good to know where you are in the process. e.g it might motivate you to press on for another few minutes if you knew you were getting near the end of a section.
If that’s right, then I think maybe the Unlock line in the graphic needs to be be below the orange belt?
@Deborah-SSi Is there a way I can carry on testing without a subscription, like I did for Welsh?
For the translation of “for about”, the woman says seit ungefär, while the man… something totally different I can’t understand
Hey everyone! Thank you so much to the learners for documenting all of this, and the speakers for testing and answering questions - huge help! Sorry for jumping in so late - you started talking about this during Japanuary when I tried my best to ignore these threads, and then after it I’ve felt too busy to go through the 99 new messages
I’m taking notes and will adjust the next version accordingly. Scanning for “really” phrases will help filter out a bunch of bad phrases already it seems. It’s interesting to see the quirks each language brings, but I’m glad to see it’s generally functional! I’ll reply to some bits that jumped out at me, but otherwise I’ll reply in more detail if needed when I go through the thread properly as I work on the fixes.
We found (as we hoped) that the good patterns stuck better than the other ones (during Japanese)! I think some of this was because of some kind of amplifying effect from the long phrases. They somehow convinced the brain that that’s the better way to say it, even when you’d been practicing the other way building up to it… But we do want to remove these variations, which brings me to…
We did find this extremely painful in Japanese - we absolutely want to fix this - and I think I have an idea of a pretty good guardrail for this which should be implemented to German soon and will hopefully fix all errors of this kind systematically. So I don’t need you to list all the weird-word-order-phrases anymore, but feel free to do it if you want - they might bring other problems to light!
It’s hard to get the balance right, expecially when we’re not translating everything manually! Personally I really like the more literal promps, and I’ve probably been adding that bias into the courses. It also really helps with the automatic mapping and leads to fewer funky target-language phrases on the whole. We will have a course-fix session with Aran next week where he might push for less literal promps, we’ll see
This is definitely on our wishlist, but it’s coming from the same team that is dealing with more important app functionality fixes, so we’ll have to wait for those first!
Material covered But yes, the early ones are pretty fast and then the time needed to reach the next ramps up quite a lot. The app should be trying to guess when you’re likely to reach your next belt, but it wasn’t quite working as intended for me during Japanuary (but it was for Tom and Aran) so please take it with a grain of salt. And content continues after black belt! (We’ll add a “dan” system at some point for those who have reached black belt!)
And finally…
Yes, please! (sorry for the late reply)
New questions:
- JETZT and GERADE
For some time we had “now” moving around the sentences but always translated as “jetzt”.
All of a sudden, I had a set of sentences with “right now” translated as “gerade” instead.
(which I don’t remember having it introduced by itself, but it might be because I skipped forward after the 30th variation of “ich bin müde” straight )
I would assume that “gerade” means more “in this exact moment”.
However after a few sentences, there was the prompt “right now” by itself and translated as “gerade jetzt”.
But only there by itself and never again in the sentences when it’s always “gerade” alone.
Did I understand the difference correctly?
And can you also use both together or just one at a time?
- Fühle / Fühlst
The English prompts are “I feel myself” and “I don’t feel myself” that sounds a bit like self confidence vs the beginning of an existential crisis but we’ll see what comes next.
They are translated as
“Ich fühle mich” and “Ich fühle mich nicht”
Then, it goes on with “Do you feel now” translated as “Fühlst du dich jetzt”
(there’s no question mark in the written sentence, but looks more like a question to me)
and "How do you not feel right now?" (which like other weird sounding ones before, I believe must be considered as ways to practise how to place elements in the sentence, and not necessarily as sentences you would actually hear or use) it is translated as: “Wie fühlst du dich gerade nicht?”
Does this mean that “fühlen” is never used by itself, and is always followed by a reflexive pronoun?