Oh, Duo

[davidgillon]

 Duolingo German's doing making excuses.

The proper translation for "Das auto war kaput, Ich konnte nicht so schnell kommen" was given as "The car was broken, I could not come so quickly".

"The car was broken"? "I could not come so quickly"? Two phrases uttered by no native English speaker ever. They definitely want an excuse for that translation!

 

Comments

[redbird]

I've been noticing that in Duolingo German too, and it wasn't happening with Duolingo French. It doesn't help that it keeps sticking me in "word bank" mode, so I can't type in something more idiomatic for the English.

"The car was broken" seems a little off, but it doesn't give me the same "not a native speaker" as "I could not come so quickly."

I'm considering switching back to French for a bit anyhow, and the chance to compare how comparatively fluent the English translations are in the two courses makes that more appealing,

[davidgillon]

I actually prefer the wordbank mode as it saves me typing*, but it undoubtedly makes it easier to hit the answer Duo's looking for.

Well, most of the time.

* Particularly useful when I'm reminded I haven't done my day's lesson at 10 to midnight.... As happened on Monday.

[redbird]

For me, the wordbank is the wrong sort of "easier," in terms of me remembering the vocabulary. I do let it autocomplete words when I'm using the phone instead of desktop, and that has some of the same problem.

I installed a German keyboard, which gives me the accented characters and the odd double S, and also means I'm handed things like the extra (to my eye) consonants in something like "schwimmt".