5 ms·
Just take a look at how poorly the bot does for Spanish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577
by mzs 4y ago
Just take a look at how poorly the bot does for Spanish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577
- wahnfrieden 4y agoIrresponsible to give this to learners
- codetrotter 4y agoMy girlfriend is Spanish. I don’t think her family would be impressed if I were to pronounce “gracias” as “grassy ass” xD
- spandrew 4y agoIt does kind of sound the same tho? Grassy-ass. Grassiyass. Grassyaas. Gracias.
- dfxm12 4y agoIf you drive from Virginia to Boston, you'll probably hear 5 different pronunciations of "Grassy ass". I don't think any of them sound like how I learned to say "thank you" in high school Spanish class.
- spandrew 4y agoTrue, but it does sound like how they learned to say "thank you" in high school, and how regional dialects can influence the change of language.
- beezlewax 4y agoPretty much what it sounds like
- crazygringo 4y agoNo, the "a" vowels are totally different. "Grassy" and "ass" have the vowel in "bat". "Gracias" has the vowel in "bot".
- netrus 4y agoBot is a problematic example, as it has many different pronunciations depending on meaning and region. But non on the common pronunciations have an 'a' (IPA), like Gracias.
- crazygringo 4y agoTrue, I was simplifying a bit. Technically "gracias" is /a/ as you point out, while bot is /ɑ/. But /a/ doesn't really exist in General American English, so bot (or bra, as sibling suggests) is the closest on the IPA vowel chart.
- jmholla 4y agoI think the a in "bra" works better in your comparison since it has an a.
- tomp 4y agoWhat's wrong with it? I'm a native speaker of neither, but they do sound similar (of course, gracias being pronounced South American style, not Spanish style). Except the fact that Spanish and English "r" differ, but I think it's reasonable for English speakers to know that, once they learn to pronounce Spanish "r".
- akiselev 4y agoEnglish is a stress-timed language whereas Spanish is a syllable-timed language [1] - there's just no way to square that circle pronunciation wise. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony
- ask_b123 4y agoThey'd certainly not be impressed; they would understand though. I just played that sentence in google translator and it sounds like a beginner Spanish speaker that still gets confused by tonic syllables.
- johtso 4y agoWell, if you read it with a Northern English accent like a Mancunian accent it's pretty close!
- andy_ppp 4y agoI swear some people seem to say “grathios” in Spain but it seems to vary so much…
- monocasa 4y agoYeah, Spaniards pronouncing a lot of 's' and 'c' sounds as English 'th' or 'z' is called the ceceo, and it's commonly incorrectly attributed to Spaniards copying a prior king's lisp.
- monocasa 4y agoYeah, it sounds like Peggy Hill pronouncing Spanish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByVeZhKmzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByVeZhKmzo
- narwally 4y agoI mean, I'd say that about regular Duolingo.
- Laaas 4y agoWhat is wrong with the example? Although I am not a Spanish speaker, naively it looks fine. The pronunciations written in English are very impressive and do indeed sound somewhat like the corresponding Spanish words (albeit of course incorrect! But most people don't know IPA).
- dimatura 4y agoLike many current LLM results, they're impressive considering the SOTA of ML until recently, but not very good in comparison to a good human baseline.
- Laaas 4y agoWhat example English words would you give as a guide for pronouncing the words?
- sureglymop 4y agoI feel like the words it gave only work for _spanish with an american english accent_. But then again it maybe depends on how you would pronounce the words for comparison like banana.
- dimatura 4y agoGood question, it's not that easy to find existing words that match that well. If you asked me to do this I'd probably try making up fake words that in my mind, at least would sound closer (and that is also non-trivial given the weirdness of English pronunciation). Also, I'm no linguist, my only credentials here are being bilingual, albeit with an accent (lived in the US from 0 to 8 years old and the past ten years, and a south-american country from 8 up to my 20s). So I lack the terminology to describe what things sound like. That said - Cola, I think is fine. The "o" in toes is pretty different from the one in adios. I'd say that maybe it rhymes with "adipose" or "lactose", except the accent goes on the last syllable. Gracias, isn't too bad, but maybe I'd say "fascias" (admittedly a relatively obscure word). Manana is obviously wrong - here I'd just make up something like "man-nyah-nah" (accent on the nyah part). For uno, I guess I'd just say it sounds like "boo-no" without the b. Tres is close enough (the T and the D are different, but it still rhymes to my ear).
- elforce002 4y agoGarbage in, garbage out? Those examples are nonsense and I'm saying that as native speaker.
- dwringer 4y agoIt does seem like the model picked up examples of pronunciations about which people are admonished, and presented them as tips of what to do rather than what not to do. This basic issue with negation also pops up a lot IME with Google's search infoboxes, so hopefully people are at least slightly inoculated.
- plexremovefrie 4y agoTheir press release says that Duolingo is using an improved custom version of GPT-4. I certainly hope so, for their sake.
- drdaeman 4y agoThe request is weird and doesn't have much to do with language learning, though. It messed up with rhymes, but I don't think Duolingo has anything similar. Like, who on Earth, if learning a language (and not just needing a phrasebook) would ever want to remember foreign language words by rhyming them with a different language? While truly etymologically related words make sense - such as "escribir" and "scribe", connecting unrelated words is IMHO a bad idea that would do more harm than good. I currently try learn some Spanish and I had some trouble with Spanish "mirar" accidentally being close enough to Japanese "見る" (which absolutely aren't related, of course, just happen sound similar), so now and then my brain had farted ("hey, I'm speaking in a third language, other than my native and English!") and I could blurt out "miro!" instead of "mira!" or some similarly weird shit unintentionally mixing up two different grammar systems as my brain struggles to explain itself through the grammar I know about. Maybe it's just me, but I think unrelated rhymes and false cognates are a big no-no when learning a new language. When I've asked ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) to explain me Spanish grammar, such as "explain me 'a' in the beginning of 'a tu hermano le gusta...') it did a decent job explaining me how it works. Factually it matched what I found later, cross-checking.