The Duolingo Thread

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RyanSmallwood
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby RyanSmallwood » Fri Aug 14, 2015 1:01 pm

I haven't used Duolingo in a while, but I may try it again to activate some of my languages. I never thought the listening or speaking exercises were effective at all, so I always went into settings and marked that I didn't have a microphone or speaker so it only gives me written exercises. I think it works best as a tool for practicing writing, the technology for the speaking stuff isn't good enough yet.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby geoffw » Fri Aug 14, 2015 1:57 pm

RyanSmallwood wrote:I haven't used Duolingo in a while, but I may try it again to activate some of my languages. I never thought the listening or speaking exercises were effective at all, so I always went into settings and marked that I didn't have a microphone or speaker so it only gives me written exercises. I think it works best as a tool for practicing writing, the technology for the speaking stuff isn't good enough yet.


I used it for this purpose for French, except I did use the speaking exercises. I doubt very much that it's doing a meaningful analysis of what you say, but it was just good practice for me to say things responsive to prompts. I also made a point of always saying the French word or phrase out loud, even when I wasn't prompted to do so.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby Cavesa » Fri Aug 14, 2015 2:27 pm

Sure, the speech analysis is not perfect. I am fairly convinced the German Duolingo considered some of my perfectly acceptable attempts as wrong until I stopped trying native like pronunciation and opted for not-bad-english-native-learner kind of pronunciation. But still, Duolingo's speech recognition by far exceeds what I had expected it to be like.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby RyanSmallwood » Fri Aug 14, 2015 2:56 pm

I stopped using the speech recognizer when I made a random sound with my mouth when preparing to speak and then it marked it as correct before I got a chance to speak. They may have improved it since then, but not knowing how well the machine is grading me I'd prefer getting pronunciation feedback through other sources.
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Cavesa
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby Cavesa » Fri Aug 14, 2015 3:21 pm

Yes, other sources are often better, including the most readily available one: My own ears and comparision to audio.

I wonder whether the speech evaluation is different for languages with computer voice and those with living speakers. Or whether it is easier for men to be compared to male voices and vice versa. Anyone knows?
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby garyb » Fri Aug 14, 2015 3:28 pm

I think the speech recognition already "expects" the correct answers: as opposed to trying to figure out exactly what you're saying, it just looks for something close enough to a recognised answer. I've no idea what actually goes on behind the scenes so this is pure guesswork, especially seeing how the words appear on screen and how it sometimes recognises my valid answer as a different valid answer. I'm curious though, as it's the first time I've seen a website with speech recognition. It seems like an "expensive" thing to do, both for processing and for sending sound data over the network, so they probably take some shortcuts.

I don't trust it to show that I'm pronouncing correctly; I just see it as a prompt to practise pronouncing a sentence aloud. I don't trust my own ears either though, because I know I have a terrible "ear" for pronunciation ;). I don't think there's a substitute for a native speaker who has knowledge of phonetics. They're rare but they exist; I recently got some great feedback on an Italian recording from Sarnek on the old HTLAL for example. Again I suppose this is another way that DuoLingo might be misleading beginners: making them think that it's giving trustworthy feedback on pronunciation and that an accepted answer means good pronunciation.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby Via Diva » Fri Aug 14, 2015 3:40 pm

From my experience, speech recognition in Duolingo is not trustworthy. There were times when I was saying exactly what the recording said, even copying the tone, and it still needed +10 attempts to accept it. For educational purposes it's much more fun to try to do a voice search or even to use voice input.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby geoffw » Fri Aug 14, 2015 4:17 pm

Cavesa wrote:Yes, other sources are often better, including the most readily available one: My own ears and comparision to audio.

I wonder whether the speech evaluation is different for languages with computer voice and those with living speakers. Or whether it is easier for men to be compared to male voices and vice versa. Anyone knows?


The only courses I know of with human speakers are Irish and Esperanto, and neither has any speech recognition in the course at all.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Aug 18, 2015 8:01 am

garyb wrote:I think the speech recognition already "expects" the correct answers: as opposed to trying to figure out exactly what you're saying, it just looks for something close enough to a recognised answer. I've no idea what actually goes on behind the scenes so this is pure guesswork, especially seeing how the words appear on screen and how it sometimes recognises my valid answer as a different valid answer. I'm curious though, as it's the first time I've seen a website with speech recognition. It seems like an "expensive" thing to do, both for processing and for sending sound data over the network, so they probably take some shortcuts.

I don't trust it to show that I'm pronouncing correctly; I just see it as a prompt to practise pronouncing a sentence aloud. I don't trust my own ears either though, because I know I have a terrible "ear" for pronunciation ;). I don't think there's a substitute for a native speaker who has knowledge of phonetics. They're rare but they exist; I recently got some great feedback on an Italian recording from Sarnek on the old HTLAL for example. Again I suppose this is another way that DuoLingo might be misleading beginners: making them think that it's giving trustworthy feedback on pronunciation and that an accepted answer means good pronunciation.


The purpose of this is production and not really perfection of pronunciation. I think that one is confusing the role of these tools. While it tries to provide some rudimentary feedback - it really tells you nothing on corrective pronunciation. But the same can be said on any other echoing method - Assimil, shadowing, Rosetta, etc... this is solely to get used to producing. It has its pluses and minuses.

And given that, it is essential that any learning method be complemented by live interaction when possible.

Personally, I talk out all the sentences anyway. It keeps me fully engaged and multimodal. I consider the mike parts as "free" points.
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Re: The Duolingo Thread

Postby luke » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:50 pm

I am EsperantoH on Duolingo and I have found some of you over there.

If you haven't dropped your handle in the thread yet, how can we follow you?
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