The lack of the word “and” in the number there made this parse really weirdly in my brain.
Instead of “I play with 615 giraffes”, I read it as “I play with 600 15-giraffes”. I don’t know what a 15-giraffe is, but it sounds like it might be an unstable isotope or something.
Thanks for spelling out why this felt wrong to me
Yeah, as far as I can tell it’s normal in America to say 615 as “six hundred fifteen”, whereas the rest of the anglosphere would say “six hundred and fifteen”.
The fact that the line break happened to be right where the word “and” was missing probably made it even harder to parse correctly.
Funny enough, I was taught that including the “and” was explicitly wrong in first grade! (American here)
Me too. I still don’t know why.
TIL it’s not explicitly wrong
Im American. I might read the number 615 as “six hundred fifteen” in some cases. Like if I was counting.
But I would not say “six hundred fifteen giraffes”, I would say “six hundred and fifteen giraffes”
To note, we don’t say “sixhundredfifteen”, we say it more like they’re separate numbers so it’s like there’s a silent “and” in there. Sometimes its not silent and it sounds like “six hundred ‘n fifteen” with a very subtle N in there.
It may be a regional thing. I learned English while I was in the states and we learnt “six hundred and fifteen” if you’re saying the digit-place words (hundred, thousand, etc), but “six fifteen” would also be correct. “Six hundred fifteen” was acceptable, but not preferred, and “six and fifteen” is not used.
All I see are math symbols.
Well, the answer has lots of numbers. So it checks out, I guess?
I went to a certain military training school with some linguists, and they told me they had face-to-face proficiency tests like quarterly.
The tests would start with normal benign conversational topics, like one would expect, but then escalate to weirdness from there.
Things like “Are you more worried about the recent nuclear-waste-being-found-in-kayaks issue, or the ongoing chihuahuas-shitting-out-whole-uncured-meat-products problem?”. The point was to see if the linguist could piece together information from non-standard esoteric shit.
Those 615 giraffes look like they’d fit right into such a test.
TIL DuoLingo is secretly using military tech
I believe these are put in place to actually test your knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar, vs just being good at memorizing the handful of simple conversational samples.
The problem is that it isn’t natural speech
Realistically who are you going to say that to in the language you are learning
While you can use textbooks to help it it better to mostly learn from natural speech / conversation because no one speaks in text book speech
Idk what in the world you’re talking about. This is a totally relatable sentence that I say all the time. You’re the weird one here if you don’t access to 615 giraffes. Sheesh.
That’s the best part, when you meet people of the language you are learning you can say the odd quirky shit from Duolingo and they’ll absolutely love it. What, you are an apple?? A dog is wearing three pullovers?? More relevant for beginners who can say a handful of stuff but can’t yet hold a proper conversation.
It’s not like Duolingo is just randomly generated sentences that make no sense either. They are carefully sprinkled in to break up the routine and make it a bit of fun.
What am I looking at here?? Its all Greek to me
Today I learned that a giraffe in Greek is a spotted camel.
I still love that in the Norwegian course you have to translate something along the lines of ‘I am sitting on the floor crying and eating bread’.
This might sound random, especially in this community, but when you create a classroom, you can activate infinite hearts. Nobody has to be in that classroom. It really works or at least worked a few years back.
My beloved internet friend, thank you so, so much. I like duolingo for expanding my vocabulary, but the infantilizing gamification drives me nuts, to the point where when I run out of hearts, I just don’t use it for weeks. This little trick will make it so that I actually use it!
Υπάρχουν πολλές καμηλοπαρδάλεις στην Ελλάδα… Δεν.
Ωχ! Πώς και μαθαίνεις ελληνικά;
Damn… How do you pronounce it ?
Το ροζ αβοκάντο
The pink avocado.
From someone who is learning Japanese (日本語)
Go and find a online community dedicated to the language your learning and search that community for guides and recommendations because it will get you way better resources than what duolingo can offer
And you can structure the way you teach yourself that language to make it easier to learn
It’s better to find resources that you can adapt to your way of learning as it’s better and easier
I’ve been using Duolingo to learn Spanish, and there are a lot of things I dislike about it. However, credit where credit is due, I don’t have a huge drive to learn but rather I’m opportunistically learning as I have time for self improvements sake. And for that, Duo does an ok job of feeding me new lessons and slowly expanding my knowledge of the language in a few minutes a day, and it’s free. After about three months I can go to a Mexican cafe, get a table, ask about the servers day, and chit chat about my kids, all in Spanish.
Which, if I’m being honest with myself, is more than I would have gotten self studying.
Exactly, japanese was extremely tedious especially at the beginning but now I know hiragana, katakana, some kanji, how to discuss hobbies, time, directions, about relatives… I 100% agree it’s not the most effective but it keeps me on track while other solutions would not keep me engaged as much. It’s better to do three minutes everyday than 30m for two days and then give up. 148 days streak ongoing
There are a lot of people who go “I tried to learn X through Duolingo and failed”. Sure, that’s probably true, because staring at the app is not how language learning works. Much like 100 years ago, people would have said you can’t learn a language by reading a single book.
Duolingo is great for basics of the language, vocabulary and constant daily lessons. But you always need more. There’s a whole language sphere out there. People actually using the language and whatnot.
I started studying French through Duolingo and about 6 months later I was like “I really need a grammar book and a dictionary, dammit”. Year in, I was like “I should try reading news in French and maybe try a book.”
