Suggestion: Page with all accepted answers
While doing the lessons and practices, I was thinking it would be really great if we could see all of the accepted answers for each question after submitting our answer. I'll often translate a sentence in one way that is marked as correct, but so often I wonder what other correct ways there are to say the same thing. But most of the time we're only shown one other alternative, and not always that. And then, of course, we've all had those times where we'd like to try one translation, but are afraid that the Owl won't like it and so enter something else that is known to be more acceptable in his eyes, but afterward we're still dying to know if our original idea was right. :D It would make learning the language faster, for me at least, because we would be able to more quickly learn the many ways the same idea can be worded in a language.
Maybe there could be a little button next to the "Report a Problem" and "Discuss Sentence" buttons that would bring up a page with a list of all the currently accepted answers. I would so love having that! I love Duolingo as it is, but that would make it even better. :)
11 Comments
I think someone once said that the average each sentence in Duolingo has something like a thousand possible translations and it gets worse as you go through further down the tree; so if this is ever implemented, it would have to sort the possible translations by popularity or some other metrics.
I see...your idea sounds good! Maybe only show the translations that people have entered more than x amount of times.
More than just 5! :) If someone wanted to only look at the top 5, they still would be able to, but there might as well be plenty.
Maybe it could show the top 5 when you click "Discuss sentence", but there would be a button that says "Click to see more" right under it?
It's not quite that easy though. Translations aren't symmetric, for example, in German "sie" can be translated as either the formal second person singular or as the third person plural; but going the other way, English "you" can be translated as either formal "Sie" or informal "du" or plural "ihr". Mathematically, the graph of possible translations does not form an equivalence class. What would be the best way to count the translations? There's no "the correct way" to count the number of possible translations.
Also, most of the possible translations are just permutations of perfect synonyms of the various words. So I suppose it'll be more useful to see that the most popular translation of "Sie schwimmen im Schwimmbad" is "You [are swimming|swim] in the [pool|swimming pool]" rather than to have all four permutations listed as different sentences, however this also brings a whole host of other issues.
I can't believe that the avg duolingo sentence has even one hundred possible correct translations, let alone a thousand. I'm 3/4 down the Spanish tree, and most of these sentences are not complicated. I like Elizabeth0's idea, and I'd be happy just to see the top 5-8 accepted translations. I agree it's a little frustrating to play it safe and give the "exact" translation, knowing it is not good English, but that it's more likely not to lose a heart. And then, sometimes taking a risk on what seems like a good bet, and losing a heart. (I don't mind losing a heart that much, it's losing the 4th one that hurts.)
Only the answers that the duo team has entered can be displayed, not al the other possible answers. It should be interesting that for every translation is indicated that it is used for writing, speaking or both. Maybe also an indication witch translation is most natural, or better not used, or used only in some country's.
