I agree with this. I've used it for other languages, going from zero knowledge of the language. It's very effective, though best combined with other resources, at providing a firm basis in the language from which to build. I powered through the German tree and then started skyping people and was able to hobble my way through conversations. And yes, you are by no means fluent by the end. But I came out of it with a pretty firm understanding of the broad strokes of the grammar, and the ability to hop my way around a conversation bit by bit.

Really, what was at its best by the end was my reading & writing ability, but that's no surprise - Duolingo's emphasis has always been on the written rather than the spoken. The TTS is actually fairly decent and did serve to attune my ears to certain unfamiliar sounds (namely the German U, Ü, Ö) and differentiate between them. If nothing else, having a speaker who can pronounce Irish authentically would serve to do the same for Irish learners. No one is going to become attuned to the broad/slender distinction if there frequently is no broad/slender distinction. Which isn't to say that we can't learn it from other resources, but the point is that then this is just a wasted opportunity - a pointless miss when it could be an effective hit. And given the popularity of Duolingo, that seems almost criminal!

It seems that Team Irish have gone quiet on the issue and I have my suspicions as to why.

This is a response from one of the moderators regarding the bad pronunciation and phonology:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaeilge/comment ... go/ck1r2fv



This just indicates to me that he is either deliberately deflecting the issue as "dialect choice" or doesn't have a good understand of Irish phonology to see the problem.

This is just a guess, but is it possible that Team Irish listened to demo samples of the voice artist from Duolingo without having a true understanding of Irish phonology, and then gave Duolingo the green light to record all the audio?

This is a comment from Team Irish a few weeks ago regarding the voice artist:

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4119932



If that's the case, it would explain why Team Irish are now being quiet and deflecting the issue. They can't exactly go back to Duolingo and say "Eh, actually, that voice artist is not native and we need to start again".

Now that Duolingo has spent the money, hired the "native" voice artist, and spent weeks recording and editing the audio, Team Irish aren't going to ask them to hire someone else and start all over again.

It was always my concern from the beginning that there were no native Irish speakers working on this course. I know a few native speakers were refused in favour of people who were more active on Duolingo.

I don't want to sound all doom and gloom because the course is fantastic and Team Irish have put so much work into it, but the audio completely butchers the Irish language.

If that is the case, we need to ensure the Duolingo staff hear us. It doesn't do the site any good if it is let to pass simply so that the volunteer team and the voice contributor can save face.

I think you are right, btw, that they heard some samples and then gave the go-ahead. I do recall a line to that effect, though I can't cite it, so take that with a pinch of salt.

If you want to lodge a complaint directly to Duolingo staff, perhaps try using the support tab at the centre on the left side of the screen (should appear on any page of the duolingo site, I believe). If enough people give them a full run-down of the concerns, perhaps they will be more likely to address them.

I do feel bad for the volunteers, because they are obviously well-meaning and hard-working people, despite this shortcoming. There's probably something of an issue in the very nature of Duolingo's application progress; correct me if I'm wrong (I've never applied myself), but it is a purely written application, right? It's clearly going to have a blind spot where speech is concerned if that's the case, and I'd say that part of the fault lies with the Duolingo staff themselves if they didn't consider that.

Irish moderator Lancet wrote: ‘Reports that the audio is incorrect show up on our interface, while text box entries get logged with DuoStaff.’

I know some of you are going through the Irish course and submitting corrections, so for those who are, it may be worth submitting text box complaints in the Report a Problem window for badly pronounced audio (though I appreciate that is a sizable task given that it's nearly every audio track).

I've completed the tree (I now know that Munster Irish and the Caighdeán are further from each other than I taught!) and have submitted corrections on everything I found odd.

I will say that the current problems are:

(a) The speaker is clearly not native and makes several errors across the course. Everytime I submitted an audio correction I checked the pronunciation against the DIAS books on the dialects, Caint Ros Muc, Sean-Chaint na nDéise and the Irish of Iorras Aithneach, so I am reasonably certain that some of these pronunciations are not valid in any dialect.

(b) Some of the sentences are direct translations of "corpo"-speak English or recent slang that don't sound very natural in Irish. To be clear I am not talking about things like Tá sé ailrít to be heard in every Gaeltacht. I'm talking about things like using prepositions like English usage, i.e. using do always as a translation of for and using "translation-ese" for technical words and sentences. This is more a problem of the final few lessons.

(c) There are grammatical mistakes in certain sentences, but these are just typical beta stage errors.

Overall however I do think it is a good course and people seem to respond to it well. It makes the initial stage of learning a language less monotonous and gets people to the early intermediate stage in a fun way.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Can somebody explain their methodology?

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I think your bang on there. In the same link you've given https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4119932 there's something very interesting. In the comments section a mini-conversation begins about the speaker in question. I'll copy and paste them here:



If you want to read the conversation directly it begins on the 23rd comment from the top; or if your finding it hard to count the comments down that far, look for the meme with a woman in a black dress throwing her hands in the air, mouth open and wiggling with excitement. The conversation in questions begins 7 comments up from that and runs until the meme).

AlexinIreland is the same person who wrote the update, so going by that conversation it seems Team Ireland did indeed check the recordings and were more than happy with them.



I do think however, it was ignorance on their part, not anything deliberate. Its been pointed out time and time again by others on different Duolingo discussion threads, some of these people have appeared here, that the state of pronunciation of most fluent Irish learners (those who have exclusively learned their Irish in school) and indeed many "new native-Irish speakers" (those who have grown up with Irish and whose parents would have learned their Irish in school and who are not native speakers themselves) is dire.

The speaker in question may have grown up with a family who spoke Irish as the main language of the household, and by definition that makes her a native speaker; but it is clear that the Irish they spoke at home was heavily based on English phonology and syntax. It is this Irish that is often referred to as being urban Irish or school Irish, now I don't want to get into a debate about that again because it can get kind of vitriol and mean, when it doesn't need to be.

This ignorance is not their fault, and that may sound somewhat condescending, but call a spade a spade, most Irish learners are not aware of correct Irish phonology. So, when they hear a speaker such as the woman in question, they hear nothing wrong- which is the case I feel with the people who gave the speaker in question the go ahead. The problem is Irish phonology is not taught or spoken of, teachers who cannot pronounce properly are teaching children the same mispronunciations*. Parents who care enough about the language and have learned Irish in school and who also wish to pass it on to their children, by speaking to them at home, pass on the same mispronunciations also; and the cycle continues. Often, when Irish learners hear Irish being pronounced properly many associate it with being a different dialect or worse they believe ts culchie pronunciation, such a mentality only feeds the ignorance.

Now, I am in no way criticising parents who have learned Irish in schools and wish to use Irish with their children. That is the only way that Irish will be normalised and the taboo associated with speaking it be lifted. In fact, I commend those parents, I wish some Gaeltacht familes or families where the Irish language has not been severed would pass on Irish with the same love and dedication- but I suppose, as the song goes, you don't know what you have til its gone. But what I do criticise is the complete and utter lack of awareness that exists in relation to Irish phonology among Irish learners and its something that badly needs to be addressed.

From a 20 minute crack at it yesterday I noticed that there were also grammatical issues regarding the copula and the genitive case- the nominative plural of lacha was used instead of the genitive plural etc... Is clear that a hell of a lot of time and hard work has gone into the course, its an absolute shame if they leave the audio files ruin it.

* As a newly qualified secondary school teacher, I got a rude awakening this year as I learned first hand about how poor the standard of Irish was among Irish pupils, which I believe is due to many factors. This also means, pronunciation can often become the least of your worries when they have a major test to get through and they can barely say their name, and that's not an over-exaggeration.

Cian

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

Without the slender set of consonants, marking plurals, genitives and fort he dialects that still use it, the vocative with masculine nouns, is not going to happen.

Irish badly spoken sounds HORRENDOUS to me, personally. I'm not joking or being over the top. It's aesthetically dissonant.

I also find it bizarre that it's so hard for people to understand the concept of broad and slender. Grammatical marking of a feature could be done phonologically, lexically, syntactically, gesturally or if we were dealing with sci-fi, even more exotic means (telepathic pointing or something). All one is doing in Irish is taking what might be sets of allomorphs (variants) of a category (say for 'l' /l/, /L'/, /l'/, /L/; for 'm' /mw/, /m'/, /mj/) and 'promoting' them to independent distinct phones that let you make contrasts in the lexico-grammar, for example, doras/dorais, carr/cairr, dul/goil etc

Compare the ways a plural could be marked (among other ways):

cat/cats [morpheme]
cat/cait [phone]
cat cat [doubling]
cat [+'plural' gesture]
and so on.

I wouldn't blame the average student not into Irish, but for people who profess to know its grammar and say they study it, and who often get heated up when every government service is not bi-lingual, it's funny they are ignoring a fundamental grammatical feature. To say you are a 'native speaker' and not have the distinction is a total joke.

I think it's obvious the DuoLingo people don't understand it, which is a shame as I expect they spent many hours doing a lot of work for it, but that's what minority languages are up against. Irish people have become so Anglicised and divorced from the world of their ancestors, some things are too alien to them to seem normal, I suppose

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mukkapazza, a member of Duo's staff, commented:



Hopefully this results in a proper solution. Glad it's been acknowledged at least.

They won't. They don't even know the problem exists, really. Not only will fixing it mean redoing the sound, it will meaning getting someone new (socially awkward), admitting they were wrong (pride), doing something about it (inertia) and learning about the above distinctions (changing their minds) and as there is a lot of people in this together it will have to happen all while the momentum is to push the ball over the line

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