Words with no audio!
The more I progress, the more I catch words or sentences with no audio. For a beginner, it's much harder to figure out the correct prononciation. Also, audio clips for some individual letters are a few milliseconds too short making the syllable difficult to differentiate (i.e. ru, gu, bu, pu; ra da, ba, pa, etc).
12 Comments
Yes, very irritating. I get that Kanji don't have one unique pronounciation, but what I don't get is that Kanji cards are pronounced most of the time (often in an unfitting way), but so many Hiragana cards aren't. And for disctint nouns formed by 2 or more Kanji, some are pronounced, some aren't. Why is this so inconsistent?
A great resource for this is www.jisho.org. You can type in the sentence and it will break it apart by word / particle, and show you the pronunciation of the kanji. Some of the words even have audio.
I have found that some of the tiles in the sentence builder do not play audio when you place them, and others do. This makes it slightly confusing, especially as I try to learn by hearing the sentence I have made said out loud.
When I've done the word match, I noticed that the character for "middle" has "chu" (the on-yomi) as a match, but the voice says "naka" (the kun-yomi)
I'm with you on this. My next lesson will be #3 of 5 on hirigana 3. I feel that I need more practice on what I've learned so far before moving on. I don't yet have a good association between the sounds and the symbols.
With my strength bars full Duolingo is only giving me the option to go back and repeat specific lessons or to to a 60-second timed test. It's frustrating and so I've downloaded another app to help with the hirigana as well.
Though I'm a beginner I'm not even coming into Japanese pronunciation completely blind - I've been in Japanese martial arts for more than 15 years of my life. So a lot of the basic sounds are already in my head.
Slow steady progress is better in the long run. While I was waiting for the Japanese program to come to fruition, I started in on Esperanto. I've found that I have to repeat lessons and take notes. Going back to sections that I've learned is especially helpful. I can safely say, "Mi iomete parolas esperanton."
After a wrong response, I would like to be able to play the audio of the correct answer. I think this would help to break the association I had with the wrong answer, and speed learning the correct one.
Also would like audio to play on last match in the matching exercises.
I have also noticed that the audio often says "naka" when I know that's not correct for the character/s. Maybe this is a default audio that isn't replaced with the correct one somewhere in development?
They should also warn you if you've gotten a particular question wrong a lot, so that you are more careful about answering incorrectly. If you answer incorrectly over and over, it just strengthens the wrong info in your brain!
"Naka" is a correct reading for that character. However, the match says "chu".
In the same vein, they give the pronunciation for the katakana "ha" as "ha" when in the context of a sentence, it usually is "wa". Kyo wa tenki ga warui. As for today, the weather is bad.
I've got another thread about this issue too. It's so bad I can't take it. So many of the words don't have audio when I select them that it's annoying to the point of not wanting to do the lesson. And so many have the wrong reading, like "chu" instead of "naka" when that's how it's pronounced in the sentence. It needs a lot of work to even be beta.
