"Ní fheiceadh sibh mé gach seachtain mar ní bhínn i mo chónaí anseo."
Translation:You did not used to see me every week because I did not used to live here.
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'You did not used to see me every week because I did not used to live here.'
That's not grammatical. It's 'used to' or 'did not use to'. We tend to elide the end of 'use(d)' and 'to', so it sounds the same either way, but if you're writing it down, there is a distinction.
Personally I prefer 'usedn't' but that's not accepted.
Bit long-winded for English, though I guess DL wants us to spell out that we understand the verb tense. The adverbial of time (gach seachtain) allows the English to go with the simple past in both clauses. You didn't see me every week because I didn't live here.
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It's only when I started learning this tense in Irish that I realized that I've probably been saying "didn't used to" all along, not even realizing it was wrong, even though logically other verbs using the did/did not form don't use the past tense form either. So, the English version of this is wrong, but even when said the "right" way sounds incredibly awkward. Your version definitely sounds better.
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How about "used not to" rather than "did not used to"? It's not accepted, but to me is both more natural and better grammar.
I believe it is not accepted just because in Irish you have one tense with the meaning of both “used to” and the actual verb, so maybe they don’t want to separate the two elements in English or you may read them as two separate things: as a non-native English speaker, and a native speaker of a language (Italian) that uses the imperfect tense a lot, I feel a slight difference in focus between “you didn’t use to see me” and “you used not to see me”. The second one gives me a sense of something made on purpose, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, it would make sense to write it as it is now, if only it was spelled correctly.
The use of the past habitual in ...ní bhínn i mo chónaí anseo is somewhere between unnatural and ungrammatical. As I noted in my comment here living somewhere generally isn't considered a habitual action in Irish and it's more usual for the past simple to be used ní raibh mé/rabhas i mo chónaí anseo.
I'm not sure what theyre trying to say in English. Thia particular rendering in English is nonsense.
I keep screwing up these ones because the Irish makes far more sense than trying to remember the EXACT construction as béarla. If only it let me write as I actually speak. "I usen'ta"
How long will it be before Duolingo fixes this? They've had plenty of opportunity by this point.
What a mangled construction. Sounds like it was generated by a Soviet computer.
Is the pronunciation for this correct? Should the end of 'fheiceadh' be pronounced with a [x] or an [u]?
Always [ˈfʲɛcəx] In Munster. In Galway, Mayo and Ulster, it's [ˈfʲɛcətʲ] before sé, sí, sibh. When not before sé, sí sibh, it's [ˈfʲɛcəx] in Galway, [ˈfʲɛcuː] in Mayo and [ˈfʲɛcu] in Ulster. Every instance of feiceadh in the imperfect is followed by sé, sí, sibh, so it has to be either [ˈfʲɛcəx] or [ˈfʲɛcətʲ]. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feiceadh