mukkapazza is one of the bosses I think, well she is a liason between the people in control and the volunteers, the moderators call her "their mentor". And this is what she said -

Hi everyone! Thank you for all the feedback, both here in the discussions and in the reports you've sent from the lessons. We're really happy to know so many people are eager to help make this course as amazing as possible. It goes without saying that the team is putting phenomenal effort towards processing all your ideas! We understand that the audio needs improvement and we are doing what we can to be as efficient and thorough as possible. Some changes have already been implemented. Keep an ear out for the rest We understand this is an issue and want to make improvements!


And Lancet, who is one of the 4 moderators on the Irish team said -

I fear I am repeating myself: if you find problems with the course audio, report them. This is the most efficient way to seek any changes to the audio. There were time pressures to bring the course out of alpha and into public beta; there is no such time pressure for beta at present. As course contributors we did not have a role in choosing the speaker, and we have no authority to unilaterally make calls about changing the audio system. There are limitations provided by the system used by Duolingo and at this stage, four days into beta, our focus at the moment is understandably on improving the written aspects of course which we have direct control over. Keep reporting!


It does look like they are paying attention but the moderators are powerless to do anything about the voice. Maybe the best idea is to contact Duolingo directly.

The voice is very disappointing. But people can still learn a lot of Irish by doing the course. There are plenty of sources to learn the proper pronunciation online.
It is good fun too, and a nice community.

Sorry Idshanks, I didn't know you had already posted this.

Well with a name like 'Mukkapazza' you get what you get

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It's hard to distill it to a simple philosophy. DuoLingo's core idea is one of "active" learning, but that's rather meaningless.

There are several main activity types in DuoLingo:

New vocabulary items are often introduced as a click-the-picture type of exercise (choice of 3). This is a bit ridiculous though, as they give you the word in your native language, and the target language version is the caption to the picture. You probably think you haven't understood, because this is just weird. You'll be asked for "fish", and then you click "iasc", which is sitting below a great big picture of a fish. Weird, unfathomable decision.

In some languages (eg German), they have a two part task for nouns with articles -- select the article from a multiple choice list (of three) then type in the noun. I haven't encountered this in the Irish course yet, and I don't know whether that means they didn't include it.

Then there are multiple choice translations -- "click all correct translations" -- and it's a choice of three again, and the translation can be English to Irish, or Irish to English.

There are also straight textual translations, where you type the translation. Again, this is either English to Irish or Irish to English.

There are also "dictation" exercises, where you type out the Irish that you hear in the audio.

Finally, you have the pronunciation practice, where you copy what you hear in the audio.

The app for iOS and Android has one extra type of exercise, using a "fridge poetry" type of thing. It's basically the translation exercise (again either Irish to English or English to Irish) but with the answer split into words with a bunch of unneeded words added in. You reconstruct the answer by tapping each word you need in turn.

So that's the question types. Now about course progression.

The course is divided into topics, some of which are grammatically led, and others of which are more about specific vocabulary (eg food). You are therefore encouraged to do everything in order... but of course the grammar is practiced in the vocabulary things too, so it's actually not necessary to get each topic to "gold" every time.

The progression is managed in a "gamified" way, so you're trying to complete "levels" without running out of "lives". This leads to the weird situation where you can encounter really difficult stuff, and get no points for the ones you get right because you run out of lives and fail to complete the level, whereas you can get lots of points when you are randomly given a very easy set of questions that don't really require much practice.

(For example, as an advanced learner of Scottish Gaelic, I can generally do the Irish->English exercises with no specific prior knowledge of Irish, whereas I would have no chance of getting it right the other way around.)

The "gamification" thing really does bug me. I remember reading years ago, when "gamification" was a relatively new idea, an opinion by a games programmer (and university lecturer) who said that gamification was nonsense. He pointed out that all game-playing is a process of learning, and that a good game encouraged playing through having a balanced learning curve. A game that doesn't get difficult quick enough feels too long, and a game that gets difficult too quickly just frustrates the user. All this stuff about "awards" and "achievements" isn't really the core of what makes a game fun, or what makes the player "learn" the game (and there are games that I played in my childhood that I've gone back to after almost 20 years untouched, and I've remembered the mechanics and the level layout surprisingly well).

Oh dear. My laptop's about to die. Strange power fault. I'll finish this later, if I can.

Cheerio for now.

Edit: OK, it didn't die, so I'll continue writing.

Anyhow, DuoLingo has a problem with unnaturalness.

For example, today I was asked to translated "cheese and bread", but in English, the natural order is "bread and cheese". I've no idea, therefore, of whether the correct ordering is "cáis agus arán" or "arán agus cáis" in Irish.

Then there is the tendency to use fragments instead of full sentences. "Tá sé" is a valid fragment, but it's not a full sentence (or if it is, it's a very rare one). This becomes more of a problem when something has a different translation as a sentence vs a fragment. EG. "I speak Irish" -- if you interpret it as a sentence, it's unambiguously "tá gaeilge agam"... but if it's not a sentence, it could be part of a sentence such as "I speak Irish at work", which is completely different. So there's two dangers in it -- you might learn wrong, or you might just remain so unclear of what the message means that you don't really "learn" at all.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Thanks, Niall for that run down. While I don't consider myself an expert by any means on teaching or pedagogy in general, in my years teaching I would check each student twice each lesson, have them twice a week and for 12/16 weeks and maybe 8 classes a week or sometimes more over a number of years and would often change the lesson (and reprint it) between classes and even pay a translator and an artist for support on explanation when needed, yet even being that dynamic, I found it wasn't easy to overcome the barriers of cultural difference, what is already known, what is not known, apathy, lack of need, specific need, preference etc.

Now, I wasn't really there to teach them, more to do experiments, but I did spend my holidays planning for the next semester and nothing ever went to plan, so I'm somewhat wary of any book or course I see going. you would see some staff who were really into the whole teaching lark getting hyped up on whatever new fad was doing the rounds only to see their enthusiasm wilt under the parching sun of student indifference.

As an aside, the funny thing about teaching discourse first, is that modern teaching methods have made it almost cognitively impossible for most people to understand, so wedded are people to the platonic sentence. Oddly enough, I even had problems myself and I was spending the time looking into it. suppose we are taught to deal with rather static things in school and speech is dynamic

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But even when we teach discourse first, we normally still do it an a formulaic way, with lots of repetition and simple substitution... which is the traditional way of teaching grammar, and which never works.

But grammar can be taught dynamically, with lots of variation and recombination. DuoLingo is partway to doing that, but a long way off. Michel Thomas's teaching (Italian, French, German, Spanish) is actually the best model we have of flexible learning, but so far no-one's really captured the essence of his teaching in a repeatable way.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Indeed Thomas' method would seem like one avenue for a teaching system. Unfortunately, there is a patent on the exact method he employs, so anyone wishing to do something similar would want to be careful how they approached it. It seems like something the owners of the estate could easily challenge but if whoever was gone after had the money they could see it off, but I don't know patent law

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They'd like you to think his "method" was patented, but it's not, because that would be impossible.

What's patented is... using the pause button. Seriously. The patent is on having a recording of prompt, student response, teacher response and a break between the prompt and the student response just long enough for the listener to press the pause button, come up with the response, then unpause it.

So as a teacher, I can mimic his methodology as close as possible. I can't use his exact course (for copyright reasons, not patent ones) but I can build a unique course using the same principles.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

I agreement as speech is much the same any way you dice it -I say X, you say Y and so on

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__̴ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡.___

Not following. What are you trying to say?

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.