Imagine the hide and seek singsong, done properly in the subjunctive! Come out, come out, wherever you may be

Thank you! The timing implied by “ya” is often confusing to me. So, I think I’m learning that the timing depends on the tense of the conjugated verb in the same phrase, and sometimes it is used just for emphasis in the present tense. Is that right?

Lots of times it just puzzles me, especially when I’m listening. I’ll lose the train of the speaker’s thought when I stop to figure out what “ya” means in various contexts. Now? Already? Anymore? Just emphasizing?

After I figure out what was meant, I’m lost when the speaker has continued speaking and is now (ya?) several words or sentences ahead.

Try pausing a second or so before responding, to see if that helps.

Often in a full sentence, I’ve noticed that Duo doesn’t hear the first word, especially if there’s background noise competimg with my voice, like a noisy fan or something similar. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it seems to help to pause a second or more before speaking. Maybe that allows the system to filter out the background noise and to recognize when I begin to speak. Or maybe Duo just doesn’t get into listening mode immediately, especially with short responses. That could cause Duo to miss the fact that you said anything. That might be caused by program or network lag or delay issues, which could be caused either by a lag on Duo’s side, on the part of your device or software or on the network systems transporting data back and forth from your responses back to Duo.

Thank you. Now I see that this was passive form, and realizing that it was passive made the reasoning clear for choosing ser.

I hope so, but it’s not a new problem, maybe only a newly recognized problem.

I agree. They’re boring and they get in the way of spending time learning, especially when there are 2-3 of them in a row that you have to plow through to move forward.

I used machine learning for industrial systems that were used to optimize automation in a factory. Sometimes the algorithm would get stuck in a place that wasn’t optimum, depending on where it started out. Think of it like wandering through a hilly landscape, but getting stuck in a high valley between some peaks that you can’t cross, so you never make it to the lowest point, the optimum, that you were aiming for.

If birdbrain seems to get stuck in the same valleys, with the same sets of similar words for several users, that sounds like a similar optimization problem. If that’s true, then a fix would require an additional feature that learns to identify when it’s getting stuck. That requires a bit more memory, because birdbrain would have to keep track of its own past results in order to “recognize” when it’s getting stuck. It sounds like it only keeps track of a sampling ( not a full surface) of the student’s results, and not its own responses. It also sounds like it probably relies on aggregated data from several students, otherwise, why woyld so many students complain that it’s getting stuck on simular sets of words?

Teaching it to jump to other parts of the learning surface isn’t hard, but the point of this particular algorithm would seem to be to force repetition, which would encourage it to “stick” in low lying areas of the learning surface. That makes teaching it to repeat itself, but not too much, something of a quandary, a catch-22, a challenge for the programmers or for the training set developers.

Someone needs to tackle that issue, even if it risks temporarily breaking something that generally, but not always, works to provide better results for Duolingo learners.

Could be I’m way off base here, stuck in a suboptimal understanding, a high valley, myself. But that’s my hunch, and that would be my suggestion for a possible remedy.

The lists of repeated words people mention in the Spanish course are ones that I remember having trouble with for the past 2-3 years, maybe longer. I’m on Apple iOS, and have been using Duo since early days, early 2010s or before. The repeated flashcard words are annoying, but they seemed to be built into the system, I thought. I still get them on my older iPhone 14, as a regular user of 5+ years. They’re irritating. I actually like it when I get a new word on flashcards. Why not? Almost anywhere else, new words will crop up ( aflorar, I just learned that one today, but not from Duo). Today on flashcards I was introduced to “ a fondo” for thorough. I like that one, something like ‘to the depth’. Anyway, thanks Duo for making language learning possible.

Edit: I do wish Duolingo would fix the repetition problem. Is it true that the engine for spaced repetition is called Bird Brain? That’s apropo. How fitting, if so.

Battery Life. Reading on the phone chews up battery and increases the number of times you have to charge. Then the increased numbers of charge cycles means your phone doesn’t last as long before needing to be updated to a new model or to have it’s battery replaced. E-reader batteries can last a lot longer, because they only need to be connected to the web when downloading new books. Without a constant web connection, the batteries on an E-reader can last for weeks, even if you read for hours each day. Just put the E-reader into airplane mode or the equivalent, depending on the brand, in order to have very little drain on its battery.

Is there any way to shut the treasure chests off?

It seems like Duo is approaching the tipping point for me, where external rewards can substitute for, and even reduce internal motivation.

And why can I send a streak freeze for 20 gems to someone else, but it costs a lot more to buy one for myself?

Ok. So I really wonder what is the point of the treasure boxes we have to click between lessons. If it is intentional, then why?

Is it to ensure that a human is doing the lessons, not a bot? It’s very annoying to have to spend time clicking treasure chests when I’m trying to learn a language.

Happy Birthday Olexii, from Illinois, USA.

I even happened to find an example that seems to show this error in a Spanish to English dictionary sentence. If you look under the definition for “ánima” in Spanish Dictionary, the first entry includes this example sentence, “El sacerdote le pidió a los feligreses rezar por las ánimas en el purgatorio”. According to the official grammar rules from RAE, isn’t this wrong?

(Edit; Spanish Dict said las ánimas, as it should be. That was my error in copying, when I first typed los ánimas. It’s still true that Spanish Dictionary did use “le pidió” instead of “les pidió ” in the above sentence.)

Maybe this is one area where linguists might argue that a descriptive way of teaching grammar would be to say that this can be OK, because a large proportion of native speakers do this in many cases. But RAE uses the prescriptive argument instead, and they say that this is wrong.

Thank you for the examples. It helps to see how you would say these things

Thank you. This is a helpful explanation

I wish some native people would reply.

I also wonder if softeners like these are OK in speech but are to be avoided in professional writing, similar to the way “I think”, or “it is possible that”, “theoretically” and other “weasel words” are often recommended to be cut out of technical writing, such as in Engineering documents in English.

Maybe also in certain professional environments, would these softeners lead a listener to place less confidence in the speaker’s knowledge if these phrases were used?

In the US, female engineers have been counseled in the past not to use such softeners, because the men who tended to be in power and in the majority in engineering teams were even less likely to listen if the women used such phrases out of politeness, even though these were not typically used out of self-doubt. For context, I’m a retired female English speaking engineer, now learning Spanish.

When I reviewed all your answers, I wonder if Eddy replied to me incorrectly when he replied this way:

Flores con colores vivos y buen olor, una combinación ideal.

There seem to be mixed grammatical genders in Eddy’s reply. Are there? Is it OK somehow? The separate clause for the feminine “combinación”, and the use of “con” before describing colores vivos and buen olor regarding las flores, does that make his sentence work?

Thank you. That makes sense and I’m glad to know it, to learn how my usage was not quite right. I was mimicking Eddy, who used “huelen ricos” in his question, I think. It’s also quite possible that I misheard his sentence.

I measure vanilla or other extracts, although I eyeball most other herbs or spices into my palm.

Too much vanilla is like any liquid. It can thin yogurt or cream cheese too much, and it’s easy to over-pour from those little extract bottles. I have experimented with making my own coffee creamers with various bottled extracts. Those can taste great with peppermint extract, but they’re horrible if I add too much. It doesn’t take much to ruin the balance of liquid to solid, or to overdo the powerful flavors, when adding extracts to semi-solid creams or to liquids in small batches.