Yeah man, I love Windmill Slice Can Goose too! That album has such an original sound to it — honestly almost brought me to my knees the first time I heard it.
sleepydragn1
joined 2 years ago
I feel like people constantly shit on Duolingo and other things like it, especially compared to other forms of language study like full classes, immersing yourself in that language via cultural exports (movies, TV shows, books, etc.), or interacting with people that speak that language.
But I think that's kinda missing the point — Duo and other programs structured like it offer a way to learn a decent chunk of a language without a lot of effort. If you put in a bit of time every day or so and take things at least a little seriously, my understanding is that you can learn a lot. Maybe you won't be truly fluent, and certainly you won't learn as much as you would with intensive self-structured learning or classes at a university, but it takes way less effort and is far more approachable.
That being said, definitely look somewhere else now that Duolingo is using AI.
FYI: This is an article from 2017.
No worries, I feel like it's hard to convey tone on the internet. I often personally find it challenging not to come off as confrontational, no matter what my actual intent is.
Reflecting on it a little further, I also think my inconsistent use of "modern" in the prior posts as sometimes a shorthand for both "contemporary" and also "plainly understood" wasn't doing me any favors in conveying my argument.
I mean, the study itself seems to disagree with that sentiment:
A principal concern for us was to test whether the subjects had reached a level of “proficient-prose literacy,” which is defined by the U. S. Department of Education as the capability of “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences” (National Center 3). According to ACT, Inc., this level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension section of the ACT (Reading). Literary prose can be even more difficult to comprehend because it requires the ability to interpret unfamiliar diction [End Page 2] and figures of speech. Dickens’ novel worked we [sic] as an example of literary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House, Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting.
First off, the linked article uses the term "archaic" first to describe the text, which is where I'm taking it from. Regardless, I don't think "archaic" is an unfitting term here — Bleak House was written 171 years ago, with a setting even further back than that. It has a particular written style that is distinctly different from typical, modern English, and it uses now uncommon terms that most modern English speakers (outside of maybe those from the UK?) won't recognize. Mind you, I'm not saying it violates grammatical rules or uses something like Middle English, but at least some of what makes it a challenging read is how old it is.
For example, did you understand what "Michaelmas Term" was without looking it up or having it defined in the article?
I think it's fair to say that them handing this poorly isn't a good sign when it comes to their ability to handle stress (and their social acumen?), but I do think that begs the question: how correlated is their inability to handle a high stress situation here with typical tasks you'd use English proficiency for, or things we'd normally associate with English proficiency?
"In real time, verbally translate an archaic 19th century novel you haven't previous read while under high stress" isn't a situation I think a lot of English majors or scholars find themselves in very often — the closest analogues I can think of would be other specific tests or maybe something like a student asking them a question in a literature course where they're the professor. The vast majority of the time, even on most tests, people can take their time reading, write down notes or make annotations, and re-read the passage as necessary, without needing to verbally dictate their logic.
As someone who arrogantly assumes that I'd be in the 5% that had a "detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House" since I achieved a 36 on my Reading ACT many years ago (and yes, I feel like a loser even writing that), I'll give a tiny defense of at least some of these participants and their results.
The study says that:
Students read each sentence out loud and then interpreted the meaning in their own words—a process Ericsson and Simon (220) called the “think-aloud” or “talk-aloud” method.
I feel like that, in combination with the potential stress of the situation, might lead to really stupid sounding answers, like some of those quoted in the article. I personally tested myself using the "mud" example, and while I think I gave a passable initial answer, a verbal answer that accurately matches and translates the original text on a sentence-by-sentence basis is fairly difficult to construct verbally for me, at least within the first pass. That job of translating the text into modern English is difficult, and is a synthesis of information that requires far more cognitive reasoning than just understanding the text. Give me a pen and paper, and I think I could do a far, far better job, and I would assume the same of a lot of the participants.
Additionally, many of the words and phrases in those samples are very archaic. Participants were allowed to search up definitions, which would definitely help to clarify those archaic terms, but again, I'll note that this seems like a stressful test, and participants may feel like they're being negatively judged for even looking up terms like that. One of the examples highlighted by the article could even be interpreted as showing exactly that:
And I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor” is—some a person of authority, so that’s probably what I would go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K., so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so, Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].
[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]
The article uncharitably attributes her behavior to "the cognitive load of reading these archaic terms and complex sentences," but I don't know, that just seems like plain test-related stress to me.
For what it's worth, what Sanders said is a lot softer than the headline implies:
Singh interjected with another question: “But could we not also say, if there hasn’t been a fair primary for the Democrats since 2008, are they not also a threat to democracy?”
“Fair enough,” Sanders answered. “I’m not gonna argue with that.”
Adding on to what you're saying: I think it's pretty clear that Morrowind and Oblivion are more focused on a first-person perspective for the player character with third-person being a bit of a secondary concern. As such, it seems to me like the focus of the third person animations is on matching what the player would see in first person, especially since they can switch between the two with a single button press.
For example, when the player holds the "A" key to move pure left while keeping their view straight, it certainly seems more natural from a first-person perspective that they're strafing left rather than turning their torso left with their head and arms awkwardly straining at a 90° angle (try this at home, it feels weird).
The alternative here would be for the character to actually turn their whole body left when you hold the "A" key in third-person, but then have their view (i.e. their head and arms) snap 90° to the right whenever you switch back to first-person, which seems odd and immersion breaking.
That being said, obviously it does look quite jank from a third-person perspective for a player to be strafing all the time, even when they're in non-combat scenarios. This isn't helped by aging animations, either.
This, but I'll also never feel sorry for them because of the way they previously intentionally nerfed AMD's processor performance in applications using their compiler (i.e. a lot of big applications at the time) by checking if the the CPU was made by Intel and disabling optimizations if it wasn't.
That was some serious monopolistic, anti-competitive bullshit.
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I actually really like the developer's rationale for why they use an anime character as the mascot.
The whole blog post is worth reading, but the TL;DR is this: