Megan's friend and Duolingo

It is in the same way that “gwd boi” is heard (as well as bachgen da).

Jiws bwch is just a joke though.

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Not really. There is no ‘j’ in Welsh, except in borrowed words and I think people probably had juice running down their chins a pretty long time back! (Cannot swear to that though!). ‘Jiws’ is really just a way of rendering a dialect joke. If you are in an area where people say ‘cow juice’ and ‘good boy’, you might be able to say either in a sentence which was otherwise Cymraeg, but if you were in a shop in Caernarfon, I do not think you should ever ask for milk as anything but llefrith. :smile: or orange juice as anything but sudd oren! :wink:

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In my experience, Duolingo tends to go for a “lowest common denominator” approach and makes learning fairly easy – I believe that one of their key metrics is user retention (i.e. how many people come back to use Duolingo again).

So if something like “ignore single-character typos and move on” results in ten “casual” learners not getting frustrated and driven off, while two “serious” learners get frustrated by the permissiveness and leave, that’s 10:2 in favour of leniency.

Similarly, there are comparatively few exercises where you have to translate into the target language – something that serious learners complain about on the forums a fair bit, because they want to be challenged. But challenging stuff tends to frustrate casual learners more and stops them from coming back, which hurts “the numbers”.

They have lots of A/B tests going on at any given point, where different users will experience Duolingo slightly differently, and at some point they decide which of those experiences will continue, but I don’t think explicit settings of the type you propose will ever happen.

It does seem rather “one size fits most”, tailored more towards the “casual learner” end.

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I’m using Duolingo as a way to learn more vocabulary. I’m not really paying much attention to sentence structure.

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Snap!!! But I have all gold now and no more new words available. Memrise, I find very hard to learn from due to lack of context!

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I too feel as if they are telling me off. The annoying part is if I forget to capitalise the first word, they sometimes mark it wrong.

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You should use Report to show them that! Caps are not supposed to be considered! I’d be marked wrong for all the proper names if they looked at upper or lower case! What is sad is when mutation mistakes are marked as typos and passed correct, while a genuine typo in the English translation can be marked wrong!

Remember, though, that native Welsh speakers also speak English, and as with all high-fluency bilinguals they will routinely mix the two (the linguists call this phenomenon 'codeswitching, and many books have been written on it - most of them unreadable of course) - a strategy frowned on by the (usually second-language) language police, but one which will enhance your authenticity among ordinary folk, who will no doubt spot that you’re a learner, but will nonetheless regard you as a comfortable and well-assimilated learner.

The choice of the English loanword here surely is because of the nice internal rhyme jIWs / bUWch - sudd buwch wouldn’t be nearly so funny. :slight_smile:

Ditto incidentally the term for annoying evangelicals at university and elsewhere - in English we call them the God Squad , and this is echoed in the Welsh term y Criw Duw - exactly the same principle as jiws buwch, with the loanword criw nicely rhyming with Duw. :slight_smile:

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One that used to bug me, was when it asks you to translate a noun like “Cath” and you write “Cat” then it could be marked wrong because you have to type “a cat” and I’m think obviously, but come on.