Lol -it reads awful.

There is only so many ways you can do speaking since it must by the fact that people are not telepathic and so must use their mouths to come out in turns and go back again to make speech (A --> B, B --> A), so putting a patent can't be that easy or defensible, I would have thought

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

Latest response from one of the course mods:

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4419934



So there we have it. They are completely refusing to acknowledge the lack of slender/broad distinction in the recordings and are passing it off as "due to dialect". Either they can't tell the difference between "leabhar" and "leabhair" or they just don't care.

Deis chaillte.

Its just pure ignorance. People unknowingly hiding pronunciation deficiencies under the subterfuge of dialect. How often have we heard that excuse. Applying English phonology to Irish, is not, and should never be acceptable as a dialect.

Ah well, another course, which took huge effort to put together, is ruined because of Anglicised pronunciation.

Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

Honestly, I think they just don't care. It's quite sad, but they won't give us a direct answer on anything, except to say it's dialectal, and even natives don't pronounce everything correct. It sucks, because we have such a good chance to change the path of a language. And we can't even get the list of sentence to record real audio. I think we should start messaging the creator of Duolingo; nobody else seems to do want to do anything about it.


Also, Cian, I think it really is just ignorance. I don't know if any of them are actual natives, so it's probably all they've ever heard.

1) Of course we care. We put hours and hours of work into this course, of course we care and want it to be the best it can be.

2) We give as much information as we can, but of course there are things we can't share. As I said many times in the Duolingo forums, we have submitted our feedback and the audio is being worked on. We as contributors/moderators have very little to do with the audio. Our main duties are to make sentences and check reports (and more recently, moderate the Irish forums).

3) Duolingo doesn't even have the infrastructure to handle crowd sourcing audio. This was one of our options when we found that Abair did not work but we eventually went another direction.

4) It is not ignorance. I believe such an accusation is unfair. We have been reading all the comments in the forums and we have been compiling feedback so the audio. We know there are some issues with the audio but we are working to get these fixed to the best of our abilities.

5) All of us are native (or at the very least, speak at the level of a native). If we weren't/couldn't, we would not have been chosen for this project.

This is a free course that we created for free. I am sure I am not the only one on the team that feels extremely disheartened by the constant bashing our course has been getting over the past few days, both on Duolingo and off.

Regardless of the voice (I think we have to be resigned to the fact that the voice will never be perfect) the course is still a great learning tool. I think you will learn the basics sooner from it than the hugely expensive Rosetta Stone. That is the intention of Duolingo, to give the basics. Nobody is expecting fluency after learning the tree in any of the courses.

Alexinireland has put his heart and soul into it. Without him the course wouldn’t be online at all. We should give him credit for the many hours of free work he has done.

Those of us who have brought up the audio issues on the Duo forums have repeatedly praised Team Irish for their work and have always said positive things about the rest of the course.

It's disheartening that they have misconstrued the constructive criticism and concern voiced by us as some sort of unwarranted attack against them and the course. It's complete nonsense.

It's also a bit of a kick in the face when you have Lancet and Odoinn repeatedly dismissing our concerns about broad/slender distinction as being something to do with "dialect choice" when it's clearly not.

This Duolingo course is probably the best place on the internet to learn Irish for free. I'm actually surprised at how fast the course is progressing through the beta phase. Most sentences now accept the "muid" form of the verb and many more alternative translations have been added. After just a week of being in Beta, I don't see many mistakes at all now. The grammar explanations are also very well done as well (although I don't know what they're like from a learner's perspective).

The audio is the only let-down of this course. But this is something that Team Irish are not in control of. They can only make recommendations to the few Duolingo staff who have to deal with the 44 other language courses that are on the site. Irish is probably not a major priority to them when compared to the courses with millions of learners. This is not the fault of Team Irish; they cannot give us direct answers about the audio if they too know nothing about it.

However, I can assure ye all that it could have been much worse. Thankfully Team Irish is made up of competent Gaeilgeoirí. The audio could have been like this example of D4 Irish. That would have sent the number of learners into the negative.

The best that we can do here is to help improve the course by going through the lessons and helping learners with their questions. Although the quality of the audio leaves a lot to be desired, complaining about it to Team Irish - who have no control over it - will not do anything positive for the future of Irish.

I don't want to intrude on this community's forum - but could you please point out where exactly I have dismissed anyone's concerns as being something to do with "dialect choice"?

I don't see how anyone could consider this an intrusion! Tá fáilte romhat!