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I'm a Turkish native speaker and I couldn't pass their intermediate Turkish material as well. EDIT: Also it felt like the whole game was written from an "Indo-

I'm a Turkish native speaker and I couldn't pass their intermediate Turkish material as well. EDIT: Also it felt like the whole game was written from an "Indo-European" perspective. For example, in Turkish there is a word "bir" (read [biɾ]) which literally means "one" which is sometimes used akin to indefinite articles (a/an). But they're not exactly indefinite articles, and sentence usually makes sense without them and when you speak fast you omit them. But in Duolingo they taught as if you should translate "the X" without "bir" and "a/an X" with "bir". That's not even remotely close to the truth (and made me get all "article" questions wrong). In Turkish definiteness is mostly denoted with accusative case. There is no single language construct similar to "article", you infer it from other kinds of information. For example "dolaba bira koy" : "put A beer in the fridge" vs "dolaba biraYI koy" : "put THE beer in the fridge". You add +I accusative suffix to "bira" (beer). This was not even mentioned in Duolingo. It also makes sense that they don't mention this sicne this is probably super advanced nuanced speaking, but then be consistent and don't teach that "bir" distinction to beginners as well.

senatorobama 9y ago
Funnily enough, the most ancient Indo-European languages have an incredibly complicated case system.
lolc 9y ago
Having only learned Indo-European languages before, when to use "bir" was hard to get right in Turkish for me. But our teacher insisted. That's not to excuse Duolingo obviously.
romwell 9y ago
>You add +I accusative suffix to [imply definiteness] Very interesting! In Russian, the accusative suffix would play exactly the opposite role. While there's no real way to say the beer without additional context, you can say: поставь пиво в холодильник / put the beer in the fridge поставь пива в холодильник / put SOME beer into the fridge
- cema 9y ago
  I think "пива" is the partitive case, though.
  - romwell 9y ago
    That's exactly it! [1] I'm a native speaker, and I wasn't even aware of partitive case. They never taught us about it, even though a mind-numbing amount of time was spent cramming the name of the usual six cases into our heads. I only got more interested in linguistics after moving to the US, and, sadly, only took one class in college on it. Thanks for noticing this, I just learned something! As a side note, I also mixed up genitive and accusative cases. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian
    - cema 9y ago
      I think the definitive and most authoritative review of the Russian grammatical cases was done by Zaliznyak: http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_statji.pdf http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_sta..., in Russian, pages 36-55. Fascinating reading.
- amaccuish 9y ago
  пива (as partitive gen.) here sounds really weird to me, like you're pouring it out of a can into something else, and putting that in the fridge. If it's a can you can emphasise it with a number e.g. я поставил одну банку пива в холодильник :) not a native speaker, just living and studying russian in moscow
  - pandaman 9y ago
    The partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.
legulere 9y ago
Articles are more of a regional feature, that is restricted to just a subset of indoeuropean languages. Articles work quite differently in Romance languages than in Germanic languages and even there are outliers like Icelandic which does not use indefinite articles. In my opinion you could go even further an say that they have an English bias.
simias 9y ago
It's not even just "indo-european" bias, it's just that word-for-word translation of sentences without any context only gets you so far. Even for something as "simple" as English-to-French it breaks down when the languages don't map 1:1 with each other. For instance there's no single way to translate "I ran" in French, it could be "j'ai courru" or "je courrais" depending on context and depending no the lesson Duolingo will favor one or the other, leading English speakers to write puzzled comments like "I thought the imperfect was 'I used to run' or 'I was running', why is it 'I ran' here?" And the answer is "it's more complicated than that, but Duolingo won't teach you that".
- megablast 9y ago
  Which is fine. It is about being understood. You are never going to get fluent from a course. Language changes, and even native speakers are learning new things.
  - sgc 9y ago
    I disagree. The nuances that change are on a different level. I have learned a number of languages from books and this is taught pretty easily. If you can't conjugate a verb, you don't know much about that language.
  - gnulinux 9y ago
    That's besides the point. My point is "definiteness" is not a concrete concept in Turkish and if you're academically analyzing a sentence you'd have to use other types of information (accusative case, the word 'bir', context, etc...) to judge if a noun is definite or indefinite (or maybe something in the middle?). But Duolingo teaches as if this distinction is as strict in Turkish as it is in English. In English "a bear" and "the bear" are different things even without context whereas in Turkish "ayi" [bear] and "bir ayi" [one bear] mean more or less the same thing outside of a sentence and I'd just use "bear", but in some contexts they'll mean different things. "Ayi cikabilir" roughly means "caution, bear in area" and as you see you don't use "bir" but it is still indefinite. Duolingo would reject this answer. "Bir ayi cikabilir" would be Duolingo's answer, but it sounds awkward, no one would say that. And there are no hard rules. In that sentence you can't just put +I to make it definite as I described above "ayiyi cikabilir" << this sentence doesn't mean anything. I think this is something your brain has to pick up implicitly while you're speaking/listening, I'm not sure if someone can discretely provide you a set of rules that always works. Just like in German you cannot translate "the" > "der". This is like Duolingo saying 'the'='der' and rejecting 'das' and 'die'. So, it is not fine, it is wrong. And the wrong thing is not that Duolingo has a bug, it is that it has made-up grammar rules, which users still have to learn. If they never learned this rule, they'd be as well understood. (I know you were replying to commenter discussing French, but I'm guessing something similar is going on)

senatorobama 9y ago

Funnily enough, the most ancient Indo-European languages have an incredibly complicated case system.

lolc 9y ago

Having only learned Indo-European languages before, when to use "bir" was hard to get right in Turkish for me. But our teacher insisted. That's not to excuse Duolingo obviously.

romwell 9y ago

>You add +I accusative suffix to [imply definiteness] Very interesting! In Russian, the accusative suffix would play exactly the opposite role. While there's no real way to say the beer without additional context, you can say: поставь пиво в холодильник / put the beer in the fridge поставь пива в холодильник / put SOME beer into the fridge

cema 9y ago
I think "пива" is the partitive case, though.
- romwell 9y ago
  That's exactly it! [1] I'm a native speaker, and I wasn't even aware of partitive case. They never taught us about it, even though a mind-numbing amount of time was spent cramming the name of the usual six cases into our heads. I only got more interested in linguistics after moving to the US, and, sadly, only took one class in college on it. Thanks for noticing this, I just learned something! As a side note, I also mixed up genitive and accusative cases. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Russian
  - cema 9y ago
    I think the definitive and most authoritative review of the Russian grammatical cases was done by Zaliznyak: http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_statji.pdf http://inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/2002_Zalizniak_RIS_i_sta..., in Russian, pages 36-55. Fascinating reading.
amaccuish 9y ago
пива (as partitive gen.) here sounds really weird to me, like you're pouring it out of a can into something else, and putting that in the fridge. If it's a can you can emphasise it with a number e.g. я поставил одну банку пива в холодильник :) not a native speaker, just living and studying russian in moscow
- pandaman 9y ago
  The partitive here is to express that the speaker is not specifying in what form or shape the beer in the fridge should appear. For a native speaker it sounds like you are talking about some quantity of beer but omitted the quantity so it's literally just some unspecified quantity of beer.

legulere 9y ago

Articles are more of a regional feature, that is restricted to just a subset of indoeuropean languages. Articles work quite differently in Romance languages than in Germanic languages and even there are outliers like Icelandic which does not use indefinite articles. In my opinion you could go even further an say that they have an English bias.

simias 9y ago

It's not even just "indo-european" bias, it's just that word-for-word translation of sentences without any context only gets you so far. Even for something as "simple" as English-to-French it breaks down when the languages don't map 1:1 with each other. For instance there's no single way to translate "I ran" in French, it could be "j'ai courru" or "je courrais" depending on context and depending no the lesson Duolingo will favor one or the other, leading English speakers to write puzzled comments like "I thought the imperfect was 'I used to run' or 'I was running', why is it 'I ran' here?" And the answer is "it's more complicated than that, but Duolingo won't teach you that".

megablast 9y ago
Which is fine. It is about being understood. You are never going to get fluent from a course. Language changes, and even native speakers are learning new things.
- sgc 9y ago
  I disagree. The nuances that change are on a different level. I have learned a number of languages from books and this is taught pretty easily. If you can't conjugate a verb, you don't know much about that language.
- gnulinux 9y ago
  That's besides the point. My point is "definiteness" is not a concrete concept in Turkish and if you're academically analyzing a sentence you'd have to use other types of information (accusative case, the word 'bir', context, etc...) to judge if a noun is definite or indefinite (or maybe something in the middle?). But Duolingo teaches as if this distinction is as strict in Turkish as it is in English. In English "a bear" and "the bear" are different things even without context whereas in Turkish "ayi" [bear] and "bir ayi" [one bear] mean more or less the same thing outside of a sentence and I'd just use "bear", but in some contexts they'll mean different things. "Ayi cikabilir" roughly means "caution, bear in area" and as you see you don't use "bir" but it is still indefinite. Duolingo would reject this answer. "Bir ayi cikabilir" would be Duolingo's answer, but it sounds awkward, no one would say that. And there are no hard rules. In that sentence you can't just put +I to make it definite as I described above "ayiyi cikabilir" << this sentence doesn't mean anything. I think this is something your brain has to pick up implicitly while you're speaking/listening, I'm not sure if someone can discretely provide you a set of rules that always works. Just like in German you cannot translate "the" > "der". This is like Duolingo saying 'the'='der' and rejecting 'das' and 'die'. So, it is not fine, it is wrong. And the wrong thing is not that Duolingo has a bug, it is that it has made-up grammar rules, which users still have to learn. If they never learned this rule, they'd be as well understood. (I know you were replying to commenter discussing French, but I'm guessing something similar is going on)