Dear anyone,
Your duolingo forum registration isn't automaticaly transferred to duome forum so in order to join duome forums you need to register with your existing or any other username and email; in any case it's advised that you choose a new password for the forum.
~ Duome Team

Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Lennart
Sweden

Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Post by Lennart »

Have you found new exercises in Italian to have too few alternatives? Ex. Not allowing both "Lei è..." And "È...". Not allowing both "lì" and "là". Not allowing "macchina", just "automobile" and more. That they are new can be seen as they have no comments. I have issued many "my answer should have been accepted" and got acceptance. But what is happening? Anyone that knows? It is frustrating when you do exercises that only allow for two errors.

User avatar
MoniqueMaRie
Germany

Re: Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Post by MoniqueMaRie »

The EN-IT course is unfortunately very poorly maintained.
I therefore switched to FR-IT at a very early stage.

Native :de: / using :uk: / learning :fr: :cn: :it: / once learnt Image / trying to understand at least a bit :poland:

User avatar
gmads
Mexico

Re: Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Post by gmads »

Lennart wrote: Sat Oct 08, 2022 11:55 am

Have you found new exercises in Italian to have too few alternatives? Ex. Not allowing both "Lei è..." And "È...". Not allowing both "lì" and "là". Not allowing "macchina", just "automobile" and more. That they are new can be seen as they have no comments. I have issued many "my answer should have been accepted" and got acceptance. But what is happening? Anyone that knows? It is frustrating when you do exercises that only allow for two errors.

I would not be so sure that they are new: Italian courses have been like that since forever. I dare not imagine Duo spending time and effort creating new material for courses like Italian. In any case, the truth is that quality in general has been degrading over time, so one cannot expect much from them, unless one goes beyond happiness for having more useless animations and unbearable voices (many people dropped out of the Japanese course because of that), and being impossed what they think is the best "learning strategy" —quite an overstatement coming from a company that doesn't teach languages: they just throw pairs of absurd sentences for one to repeat.


:hash:  ㆍenglish ㆍgeneral ㆍdebate ㆍduolingo

Last edited by gmads on Wed May 10, 2023 4:26 am, edited 2 times in total.

🦎  Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.  🦎
Antinomy - Imagination

🇲🇽 :us:  ·  :it: 🇧🇷  ·  :ru: 🇦🇪

Marghvran

Re: Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Post by Marghvran »

Lennart wrote: Sat Oct 08, 2022 11:55 am

Have you found new exercises in Italian to have too few alternatives? Ex. Not allowing both "Lei è..." And "È...". Not allowing both "lì" and "là". Not allowing "macchina", just "automobile" and more. That they are new can be seen as they have no comments. I have issued many "my answer should have been accepted" and got acceptance. But what is happening? Anyone that knows? It is frustrating when you do exercises that only allow for two errors.

Yes, I think you're perfectly correct. Originally Duolingo would insist on a particular translation when several others were obviously acceptable. But it was possible to work around this by making a note of Duolingo's "correct" answer - however strange it was. Next time round you gave the same crazy answer back to Duolingo and passed the test.

This is not a successful approach now. With the recent new "pathway" design there has been a large increase in the number of questions. For the more advanced exercises there is another obstacle. If you repeat the same exercise every day for a week you get a different set of questions each day. So noting down your mistakes doesn't prepare you for the same exercise next day.

An important weakness of Duolingo has always been the idea that some translations are right and others wrong. This works well at the basic levels of a language. But at the more advanced levels languages don't work like this - many translations may be acceptable depending on context. Sometimes expressions can't be translated.

Interestingly, this turns the higher level Duolingo exercises into a gambling game. Let's say there are 5 acceptable translations. If Duolingo arbitrarily insists on one, then what are the chances that your guess will be the same? It's a pure gamble. There may be some educational value in this game, but there's also a risk of spending too much time on the website trying to get lucky!

Last edited by Marghvran on Mon Dec 19, 2022 4:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
boulangerie
Egypt

Re: Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Post by boulangerie »

MoniqueMaRie wrote: Sat Oct 08, 2022 2:55 pm

The EN-IT course is unfortunately very poorly maintained.
I therefore switched to FR-IT at a very early stage.

Thank you, I thought before that italian from french is better but i did not try it for long. Now I will start the french one.

User avatar
Thomas.Heiss
Germany

Re: Bad quality in new Italian exercises

Post by Thomas.Heiss »

I'm light-years away from starting a language from French after my quick Busuu French one year affair..Lol.

I'm still interested in starting the PT->FR course but

  • missing FR audio
  • no free PT typing
    might not make this endeavor very enjoyable?!??

No idea how good or maintained the PT->ITA course is.
I could speak more Italian here in Germany than Portuguese, French or Spanish, that's for sure.

Before starting a new laddering tree (from PT) I probably should have resumed work on the two PT reverse trees. But with the Web updates, new path and Camilo's broken TreeEnhancer userscript this hardly makes any sense now.

My tip would be to use the old Android V5.52.5 or similar version for volunteer contributor courses.
You want to use the old tree, not the new path.
Then Web T&N will align with the skill names.
Also you can focus more on dedicated grammar- and verb tense names and work on higher crown levels.
Unfortunately, for TARGET translation exercises or cloze-deletions there won't be ITA audio.
That was the main reason why I was a Website user for so many years before my old Laptops broke down.

This is hardly possible on the Web and a path with an empty guidebook and were the whole course structure got changed, not how the former contributor had designed "their tree".

:de: Native | :us: Upper-B2 (BritishCouncil) | ImageL25 (Duo) / A2 (6+y, McGraw-Hill) - Learning (Busuu): :fr: (A1 McGraw-Hill) | :brazil: (interm.)

Post Reply

Return to “Italian”