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Comment by mzs | Hacker News Reader

Just take a look at how poorly the bot does for Spanish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577

The 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.

Garbage in, garbage out? Those examples are nonsense and I'm saying that as native speaker.

It 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.

Their press release says that Duolingo is using an improved custom version of GPT-4. I certainly hope so, for their sake.

Irresponsible to give this to learners

My girlfriend is Spanish. I don’t think her family would be impressed if I were to pronounce “gracias” as “grassy ass” xD

It does kind of sound the same tho? Grassy-ass. Grassiyass. Grassyaas. Gracias.

If 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.

True, 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.

Pretty much what it sounds like

No, the "a" vowels are totally different.

"Grassy" and "ass" have the vowel in "bat".

"Gracias" has the vowel in "bot".

Bot 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.

True, 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.

I think the a in "bra" works better in your comparison since it has an a.

What'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".

English 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

They'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.

Well, if you read it with a Northern English accent like a Mancunian accent it's pretty close!

I swear some people seem to say “grathios” in Spain but it seems to vary so much…

Yeah, 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.

Yeah, it sounds like Peggy Hill pronouncing Spanish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByVeZhKmzo

I mean, I'd say that about regular Duolingo.

What 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).

Like 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.

What example English words would you give as a guide for pronouncing the words?

Good 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).

That is the way language learning books were written before the days they could provide audio recordings. Now with modern technology it is much better to learn the sound system of your target language then try to find comparisons with your native language.

I 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.

No, it's absolutely terrible on every single one. For some reason it's telling you how to pronouce them with an English accent, or rather how an English-speaking person would pronounce it if they didn't speak Spanish at all.

> Adiós: "Adiós, my toes" - rhymes with "toes"

In this example "toss" would be much closer than "toes".

But yeah, this is awful. I don't know how this happened.

I disagree that Spanish's /o̞/ is closer to General American's /ɔ/ than to its /ou/.

But that's fundamentally a question of perception that people are going to disagree about

you must pronounce “toss” differently than most english speakers

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