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Oh! Scealta!
[ETA] A nice history of the Irish language…
And on pronouncing Irish names…
Soooo… just logged into duolingo on my phone… to do my second lesson of the day… and all of a sudden the voices have changed - and I did not do any updates on the app (this is on mo fon poca). Instead of it being a woman’s voice that sounds like it was recording by an actual person, it switches between a male and female voice, and it’s clearly something that’s AI generated… 
Anyone else who is on duolingo seeing that?
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All was well this morning, but I’m tempted to check again after dinner. 
I’ll be pissed if they messed with Lily, Zari, or Junior - they’re my comic relief!
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Another weird thing that changed… the voice was only used on some lessons, and now when it does a lesson with a word bank, it plays the shitty robot voice saying the word!
I’m only on the Irish course, BTW!
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Yikes! I just tried a German lesson. It only had a few characters, but their voices were the same. The vocab quiz and listening exercises alternate between male and female voices.
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Is it just me, or does it make it harder to understand?
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It’s not just you. I get slammed by this in Italian. I have to use the slow mode for the listening exercises because it’s worse in lower registers. If it would let users choose, that would be nice. However, I’m using the free version so can’t really complain.
This sort of thing?
I suppose I’ve gotten used to how the characters sound in German and French-- other languages sound quite different.
The latin course-- most neglected of them all–still uses live recordings that sound crowdsourced from individuals recorded in bathrooms, grain silos and other paragons of accoustical excellence.
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Still better than Hebrew, which has three voices - a good quality professional male voice, a female voice that tends to speak too fast and is recorded at a much too low a volume, and what sounds like a teen on his gaming headset who recoded about two sentences before getting bored, but you get to hear him a lot because one of those sentences included the word “זה” (“this”). And between the three of them, they cover maybe half of the content at best, which is a problem because Hebrew is generally written without the vowels, so you can’t know exactly how something is pronounced just by looking at the letters. And the slow pronunciation button either doesn’t do anything, or just gives you the regular recording again. And the cast of Duolingo characters doesn’t appear even in the form of cartoons.
Out of the courses I’ve tried, French and German are the most fleshed out with full casts of character voices, although sometimes I still get a robot voice in German. Ukrainian relatively recently got two recorded voices - male and female - in addition to the female robot voice, and they all appear at about equal frequency. Polish only has male and female robot voices. Latin has various crowdsourced recordings. And Hebrew is a mess.
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I should just spin off a thread called “Fucking Duolingo” at this point. The current Japanese lesson I’m on is just terrible.
I had to do this one so many times. まさか is a new word with no explanation that I had to look up in my dictionary. In other places in this lesson it’s at the start but here it has to be after the それは for some reason. I don’t get why it’s 本当の. I don’t get why it’s でしょう. The comment section shared my frustration.
まさか again but this time at the beginning. I don’t get the とは just kind of floating there in the middle. (Is it because と is acting as a quotation?) I eventually got this one through sheer brute force.
Oh, come the FUCK on. That one was complete bullshit and I reported it. Yes, “were” is more grammatically correct English, but to mark me wrong for that when “was” was in the word bank is crap.
This one consistently was wrong for me. Is it really different to have たまたま where I had it versus where it wanted it? I reported this one.
This one was also crap. Yes, my translation was idiomatic so I get why it was marked wrong, but it was in the word bank so it was a kind of a dick move not to accept it. (I guess only Duolingo gets to use idioms.)
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I share your pain. I keep seeing things in French that are inconsistent, to say the least. The latest was with the verb sortir. First the system translated je sors as “I’m coming out” 
, then two lessons later it was “going out,” which is what I expected from the beginning. 
Whenever Duolingo flips the exercise to make the user pick the corresponding phrase in English it’s a mess. Nine times out of ten it gives me that message about an alternate way to say what I said. My response is always that no one speaks that way - at least not in American English. This happens the most in German with word order*, but also in any language when they don’t make it clear that “you” is formal, informal, or plural. At least in Italian they make a distinction for the plural by using “You all” as a prompt. 
*Ich treffe meine Kollegen jeden Freitag im Biergarten. If you say where before when in English translation responses, it tends to pass. If not, you might get flagged as incorrect.
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This is an idea I can support!
In my head the when before where seemed more natural than where before when, until I said it aloud.
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Pretty much, but to try and explain some of the frustrations:
本当の in this sentence means “actual truth”; it might make sense to think of “本当の話” as meaning “honest speech”.
でしょう in this sentence softens the statement, so it’s basically equivalent to adding “right?” to the end of the sentence.
まさか is often used to add emphasis to a statement in a “never expected this” kind of way, which is the function it performs in this sentence. You could say the same thing without まさか, but it would be missing the expression of disbelief: “I didn’t think she would lose” vs “I never thought she would lose”.
とは is kind of a dick of a compound particle, because it is used to shorten “という事は” and “という話は” and similar phrases. In this sentence, と indicates that it’s a reported speech/concept, and the は acts as a subject marker and indicates that the reported speech/concept is now the subject of the sentence.
Yup.
I think the issue in this screen shot is that you have used “もし” rather than “まし” to try to conjugate the verb to the polite form “ました”, when actually duolinguo is looking for the past-tense dictionary case “いた” to finish the sentence.
I think that’s because in this instance, the すれば in もっと勉強すれば is shorthand for すればするほど, which carries a specific meaning of “the more you do x the more y”.
If you were trying to say “study hard and your Japanese will improve”, you would say “一生懸命勉強（いっしょけんめい）勉強すると 日本語が上手になるよ。”
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Thanks for adding some extra context. This is the kind of stuff Duolingo does none of and I often have to go to the comments section. At this stage it’s more complaints than help though.
Ah, crap! Yup, that was totally a typo on my part. That being said even with the correct conjugation I was still marked wrong when I put たまたま in the same spot versus the beginning. The comments section shared my confusion with some saying it should have been accepted.
Oh, yeah. I know that one was totally on me and I should have used “more”. It was more of a meta comment around how Duolingo just loves to provide you with completely idiomatic phrases and expect a specific but indirect translation (like お腹がすきました as “I am starving” which was a particularly confusing one for me because it’s such a non-literal translation, doesn’t use the 空 kanji, and a past tense Japanese conjugation but present tense English phrase*). Of course the moment I use something slightly idiomatic (and it’s even in the word bank), it says no.
* on the upside that whole thing annoyed me so much that phrase is pretty much burned into my brain now.
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When I clicked the raised thumb, I made sure to also say “Right!”
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Raised thumb? One beer coming up!
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