Duolingo review on Thoughts on Translation blog

[mcthulhu]

http://www.thoughtsontranslation.com/20 ... -duolingo/

The author is President of the American Translators Association (ATA), as well as a professional French-English translator and a "compulsive language learner." Her blog mostly tends to focus on the business side of translation, but I thought these comments were interesting.

[MorkTheFiddle]

I would rather she had waited until she finished a course before she recommended Duolingo. At 40% of German "fluency," I would have recommended Duolingo myself. At 45%, no way. One of the "correct" answers had a couple of legitimate alternatives, but only the "correct" answer let me through the gate. So instead of testing my knowledge of German, Duolingo was testing my ability to memorize answers. One should be able to register a protest of some kind and then move on.
If Duolingo were new, and if German were an obscure language, maybe one such thing such as this could slide. All this should have been worked out even before Duolingo went on line. One grows weary of being an involuntary beta tester, though granted I used the free app.

[Xenops]

I liked this comment:

Niall
December 14, 2017
Personally, I think you’d have been far better off just getting the Michel Thomas courses and completing them as fast as you could — I went through the whole thing in two weeks when I was preparing to visit a friend.
I had done two years of high school Italian over a dozen years previously, and I was most of the way through a distance degree in Spanish and French at the time.
By the time I got to Italy I could understand most conversations around me, based on the grammar I learned on MT and my ability to recognise cognate vocab from French and Spanish. My production was a bit halting to start with, but after a few days in the country you couldn’t shut me up!
I also think you’ve written your review a little too early… from the 40% figure and your description, I think you’ve hit the point where I’ve lost interest in Duolingo in a couple of languages. It seems to just become a chore and a drag — a seemingly random collection of words with little or no recycling of previous language.
One thing I’ve noticed from Luis van Ahn discussing the site is that development policies seem to be driven more by web design/marketing metrics rather than by pedagogical goals — i.e. they track what makes the site “sticky” rather than what helps users learn.

I don't recognize the name, but I can see this person being a regular on our forums.

[Speakeasy]

My intention is not to digress from the central theme of this discussion thread. Nevertheless, I find Niall’s assertion that he/she could understand conversational-level Italian based solely on his/her quick review (a couple of weeks) of the Michel Thomas Method, coupled with his/her reliance on Spanish and French cognates, to be at odds with the observations in “Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching” by Frederick H. Jackson and Marsha A. Kaplan of the Foreign Service Institute. This suggests that he/she must have attained (and retained) a solid B2 level in “two years of high school Italian over a dozen years previously” and that his/her recent study of Spanish and French had brought him/her into the C1 range.

In fact, I would offer that it is at odds with the experiences of many members of this forum. For example, nooj recently reported on his difficulty in participating in conversations, a matter to which my second reply was an attempt at describing the sources of interference:

Speaking in a group – Language Learners’ Forum, 2017-12-21
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=7391

Perhaps Niall’s understanding of conversational-level Italian was significantly less than he/she sincerely believed it to be ... as in: “Through only 15 minutes of study a day, over a two-week period, with the YYY Language Programme, I was able to understand everything! The locals even complemented me on my flawless pronunciation, I can’t wait to 'master' my next language!”

To reiterate, my intention is not to digress from the central theme of this discussion thread. I just found Niall’s assertion a little hard to believe. Merry Christmas!

[reineke]

That commenter was likely Cainntear. Someone with a solid knowledge of Spanish should be able to quickly develop an understanding of conversational-level Italian based solely on this knowledge. Duolingo and MT are optional.

[Speakeasy]

If the commentator was Cainntear, then I would tend to accept his self-evaluation. However, my French is at the C2 level, whereas my Spanish fluctuates between A1 and B1 (backsliding, wanderlust, rekindling an ancient romance only to abandon it once again) and, while this most definitely helped me make rapid progress in Italian, I would not make the assseration that I could particpate in multi-person conversations with the locals (been there, done that, but only with enormous effort).

[reineke]

Why are the Italian and Spanish language so similar?


"A lot of the answers here have given the obvious point: they are similar because they are part of the Romance family, descended from Latin.

I read your question differently, however, as something more interesting: why are Spanish and Italian so superficially similar within the Romance club, when things like French – just as much a descendant of Latin – are different?

I have seen, for instance, effective conversations between Spanish speakers and Italian speakers: you can tell they need to work quite hard but it is perfectly possible. On the other hand, it is far more common to see Italian tourists in Paris needing to switch (amazingly enough) to English in order to get by. Why should this be?

As a group, these three languages have evolved in very, very similar ways. They have virtually identical verb systems, for instance – which is different from Latin: all three have innovated their verbal systems in pretty much the same way. This is remarkable: even Portuguese, for instance, which has similar categories, has got there in different ways. A surprising example is in the pluperfect: Portuguese and Galician have a synthetic pluperfect, while the others form their pluperfect using ‘have’ as an auxiliary – a striking shared innovation. They all also have pretty much the same pronominal declension systems, word order, syntax, etc.

So given that, what makes French different?

The key here is phonological change – that is, changes in the sound system. Phonologically, Italian in particular is a very conservative Romance language.

Italian’s vowel system went through the first shift from Latin to Proto-Romance that also happened in French and Spanish, but it more or less stopped there. Spanish has gone only slightly further, collapsing the mid-vowels together; so in Spanish, there is only one sound for each of <e> and <o>, whereas Italian still contrasts a higher/closed version of each with a lower/open version. So Spanish has a five-vowel system while Italian a seven-vowel system, but the differences are predictable. (Remarkably, they even independently had similar vowel breaking – so bono changed to buono in Italian and bueno in Spanish; thus is symmetrical in Spanish and affects /e/ as well, but is only in the back vowel in Italian.) French, on the other hand, continued with some very unique vowel changes that did not happen in the others, such as nasalisation, or changing /a:/ to /e:/ – aimer in French vs Sp amar, It amare.

On the consonant side, again Italian is very conservative. The most obvious place to see this is in the intervocalic stops. One of the big splits in Romance is that the eastern half of the Romance world –Italian, Romanian, the regional languages of Italy – generally retained most of the Latin intervocalic stops, while the ones in the western area – French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, etc – all went through a process called ‘lenition’, which literally means ‘softening’. This means that original voiced stops between two vowels were generally turned into voiced fricatives or approximants and eventually lost altogether, while voiceless stops became voiced.

Spanish has undergone at least one round of lenition, but French has undergone several, for some of the consonants.

So consider eg:

Lat saporem > It sapore (intervocalic p intact) vs Sp sabor, Fr saveur. Here French and Spanish show a similar two rounds of lenition: first to voice the p > b, then to change that b to a fricative / approximant (spelled <b> in Spanish).
Lat securum > It sicuro (intervocalic c intact) vs Spanish seguro vs French sûr. Here Spanish shows the same degree of lenition as above, but French goes one step further and loses the consonant altogether. As a result, the vowels have run together and contracted.
French not only had a higher degree of lenition, but it then went a step further and lost all final consonants altogether, while also (actually earlier) losing or contracting many of the unstressed syllables if they were open.

Put all of this together and you can see how a word like Latin cantatum would end up pretty much unchanged in Italian cantato and still recognisable in Spanish cantado (just a little bit of lenition going on), but have almost no sounds in common other than [t] in French chanté [śãte:].

So Italian and Spanish are more similar to one another than to French due to both of them being relatively old-fashioned, phonologically speaking, while French has been wildly innovative in its phonology.

The fact of this retained archaism makes classification quite difficult in Romance. For instance, one of the common splits is based on that first round of lenition, which divides Romance into Western Romance and Eastern Romance. (This split also gives us one of the major innovations of Eastern Romance, which is the change of final -s into a vowel: hence the Italian plurals amici and amiche vs Sp amigos, amigas. Romanian is similar to Italian in this. We can see it is a change from -s as it also impacts the second person singular of verbs.) Another common division groups Iberian separately and looks to the much greater vocabulary similarity between French and Italian than French and Spanish (so Fr manger, It mangiare < Lat manticare vs Sp/Port comer < Lat comedere; Fr parler, It parlare < Lat parabolare vs Sp hablar, Port falar < Lat fabulare).

Ironically there is virtually no categorisation that puts Italian and Spanish together; the only thing grouping them is their relative conservatism."

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-the-Itali ... so-similar

[Speakeasy]

Please accept my sincerest apologies for having initiated this digression. Merry Christmas!

[basica]

I think Duolingo is one of those sites that works best if you understand its purpose, or perhaps better to say what is its strength/s. It strikes me as a site geared towards casual engagement of a language. Someone interested in the basics who wants to get a feel for what's going on. I don't know whether it's all to useful to a dedicated language learner, other than it being a small part of a much larger repertoire. As someone else has mentioned, I didn't really like its rigidity all too much either and also like they said, you can't really complain too much about "free".

If the commentator was Cainntear, then I would tend to accept his self-evaluation. However, my French is at the C2 level, whereas my Spanish fluctuates between A1 and B1 (backsliding, wanderlust, rekindling an ancient romance only to abandon it once again) and, while this most definitely helped me make rapid progress in Italian, I would not make the assseration that I could particpate in multi-person conversations with the locals (been there, done that, but only with enormous effort).

Just to throw in on the anecdote pile: A friend of mine is a native speaker of Spanish from Chile, and according to him when he was in Italy he communicated using Spanish and the others using Italian. This isn't to say he was having fluid conversations with the natives there, but he was comfortable enough to get by. I imagine someone with a high knowledge of Spanish, and some exposure to Italian and how it works would probably have a decent time communicating.

[Cainntear]

That commenter was likely Cainntear.

Guilty as charged. I was playing trivial pursuit in Italian at the end of that week, with minimal need for translation help from the Italians. That and Catalan were the peak of my language learning, and I've got kind of lazy since.