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- Any Chinese like me tried the…
Any Chinese like me tried the course out of curiosity?
I used to use Duolingo for learning Italian but gave up because of my busy schedule. Recently I saw them updated the site with a Chinese course so I decided to give it a go, but I can't get all of them correct just because of the difference in saying the words. I was shook when 9 dollars is not an acceptable answer when only 9 'yuan' can be the answer, anyone in common?
21 Comments
I'm Chinese and did just try the course out of curiousity + free lingots/XP!
9 dollars is not an acceptable answer for 9 yuan. That I agree with. "yuan" is the referrer to the Chinese yuan or renmenbi. 9 dollars would be "9 mei yuan" for U.S. dollars.
I am learning Chinese by taking the Duolingo Chinese course for English speakers and taking the Duolingo English course for Chinese speakers. Neither is perfect. The English course uses awkward English. I think it would help if a native speaker reviewed the lessons. Otherwise, it's fun to learn Chinese both ways.
I'm a native Chinese speaker and I did try out the course out of curiosity and I found that quite a few translations were strange/off and some were completely unfamiliar to me.
Although I will have to say that for many Chinese words/phrases, there is not an exact English translation, so some people will translate it to different things.
老外 here. It was terribly frustrating in the beginning because several CN - EN translation activites only accepted one translation, sometimes flat-out wrong, like rejecting "You" as a translation for "你们", only accepting "You all" that's not grammatical guys . . . it's a little better now, I think, like many others, I reported incorrect translations and now it's a bit more lax.. recieved several "thank you, we now accept this translation as correct" automatic emails.
I felt like it was enforcing a rigid and awkward Chinese, choosing to use some turns of phrases that seem rather odd (ie. 你会不会去 as more correct than 你去吗?) I tried it out to see if I could recommend it to a friend, but it would be rather strange to speak to someone who spoke like that...
It also seems to think 喂 is more formal than 你好... (translating the former as hello and the latter as hi)
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"Hello" is the standard way to answer the phone in English. Likewise 喂 is the standard way to answer the phone in Chinese. In this context, this would be the correct translation.
Also, my Chinese isn't spectacular yet, but I understand that 你会不会去 and 你去吗 have different meanings -- the former clearly asking "Will you go?" whereas the latter is vague about the time. Though I expect 你会去吗 should also convey this?
I decided to try Chinese out of curiosity as well. I am still struggling to go through the Chinese course, and am confused. So you're not alone.
I decided to try it out of curiosity as well as strengthen my weak Simplified Chinese reading skills. To me, I thought that at least parts of the course make sense, but not all parts were correct (although my Chinese skills isn't that great in general). (I also took the placement test at the beginning so I skipped more than half the language "tree".)
I’m not getting perfect on this course either. So many of my responses were wrong because of one or two characters and it’s still the correct meaning. But anyway, seeing that Chinese and English are two very different languages a word for word translation may not always be possible. No doubt there’s room for improvement but it’ll come gradually.
Exactly. This is the biggest problem with this course(the only one I can find, too) and I still think they can fix it.
Ey wassup
I get really salty whenever I KNOW AN ANSWER IS RIGHT but it counts it wrong. Like seriously. Some grammar was incorrect as well.
Not like I'm one to talk but still.
I didn't because we are learning Mandarin at school and I did this for extra credit. And yes, for all those harry potter fans out there. I am a Ravenclaw.
I was born in China and learned the Mandarin language... but the pronunciation on this site is so way off. Even though different provinces have their own accents, the one on here is just weird to me. :)
So, should I continue it? I'm not a native speaker and I don't know if it's a good idea to learn from this app.
