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Offering Traditional Chinese would require a lot of review work to catch character mapping errors and phrases that are not idiomatic in Taiwan. Given the low qu

Offering Traditional Chinese would require a lot of review work to catch character mapping errors and phrases that are not idiomatic in Taiwan. Given the low quality of Duolingo's existing Chinese sentences, I wouldn't hold my breath. (I've played around with the Mandarin class last year and immediately ran into some mistakes; not sure how much bad luck was involved.)

sersi 5y ago
I was extremely surprised at how poor quality Duolingo's Mandarin class was.. I don't speak fluently but I speak well enough for daily life and even I could find some errors (and confirmed with my partner who is a native speaker) In all languages I speak decently, I've been surprised by how poor quality the lessons were.
throwaway09223 5y ago
Would you mind offering some examples? I'm a beginning learner and my assumptions are based on the character mappings I see in Pleco, and having toggled HelloChinese between simplified/traditional. I would love to study areas where character meanings change.
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  Just going through the Mandarin onboarding in Duolingo again, and one of the common errors is that 得 is pronounced de2 in sentences where it should be dei3. There are also common words like 星期 where the characters are the same in SC/TC, but the tone would be different in a hypothetic Duolingo TC class (xing1qi1 vs xing1qi2), and I don't recall ever hearing "下星期" in Taiwan, it was usually 下禮拜. Erhua such as "小一點兒" is also not something that feels natural in TC. But I think you are specifically asking about characters where the mapping from SC to TC is not 1:1. This StackOverflow answer has a few examples and a link to an exhaustive list on Wikipedia: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 I sometimes read TC clickbait articles, and when they use 后 where it should be 後 that's usually a sign of a crappy machine conversion from SC. 發髮 and 干乾幹 are two more really common character groups that map to a single SC character. The rabbit hole goes even deeper because the same Unicode character can have typographic differences by region. Just today I learned that Apple's PingFang SC and PingFang TC fonts use a different "roof" on the character 龜, even though it is the same traditional character in both cases. More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character (but that wouldn't be an issue for a TC Duolingo class)
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Thank you, this is really helpful and gives me some good starting points. I had no idea the mapping wasn't 1:1!

sersi 5y ago

I was extremely surprised at how poor quality Duolingo's Mandarin class was.. I don't speak fluently but I speak well enough for daily life and even I could find some errors (and confirmed with my partner who is a native speaker) In all languages I speak decently, I've been surprised by how poor quality the lessons were.

throwaway09223 5y ago

Would you mind offering some examples? I'm a beginning learner and my assumptions are based on the character mappings I see in Pleco, and having toggled HelloChinese between simplified/traditional. I would love to study areas where character meanings change.

gurkendoktor 5y ago
Just going through the Mandarin onboarding in Duolingo again, and one of the common errors is that 得 is pronounced de2 in sentences where it should be dei3. There are also common words like 星期 where the characters are the same in SC/TC, but the tone would be different in a hypothetic Duolingo TC class (xing1qi1 vs xing1qi2), and I don't recall ever hearing "下星期" in Taiwan, it was usually 下禮拜. Erhua such as "小一點兒" is also not something that feels natural in TC. But I think you are specifically asking about characters where the mapping from SC to TC is not 1:1. This StackOverflow answer has a few examples and a link to an exhaustive list on Wikipedia: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707 I sometimes read TC clickbait articles, and when they use 后 where it should be 後 that's usually a sign of a crappy machine conversion from SC. 發髮 and 干乾幹 are two more really common character groups that map to a single SC character. The rabbit hole goes even deeper because the same Unicode character can have typographic differences by region. Just today I learned that Apple's PingFang SC and PingFang TC fonts use a different "roof" on the character 龜, even though it is the same traditional character in both cases. More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character (but that wouldn't be an issue for a TC Duolingo class)
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Thank you, this is really helpful and gives me some good starting points. I had no idea the mapping wasn't 1:1!