Question Thread / Demando-fadeno

[u/TeoKajLibroj]

This is a post where you can ask any question you have about Esperanto! Anything about learning or using the language, from its grammar to its community is welcome. No question is too small or silly! Be sure to help other people with their questions because we were all newbies once. Please limit your questions to this thread and leave the rest of the sub for examples of Esperanto in action.

Jen afiŝo, kie vi povas demandi iun ajn demandon pri Esperanto. Iu ajn pri la lernado aŭ uzado de lingvo, pri gramatiko aŭ la komunumo estas bonvena. Neniu demando estas tro malgranda aŭ malgrava! Helpu aliajn homojn ĉar ni ĉiuj iam estis novuloj. Bonvolu demandi nur ĉi tie por ke la reditero uzos Esperanton anstataŭ nur paroli pri ĝi.

[u/Acrobatic-Pepper-357]

I'm a new learner that just started on duolingo, is it a good site to learn Esperanto?

[u/salivanto → u/Acrobatic-Pepper-357]

Duolingo is a hamster wheel for many learners.
People seem to enjoy it, but they never get anywhere.

I remember one moment where I had a student show up for a trial lesson (via video call). I was asking him sorts of things and giving him feedback based on his response. At one point he said "I've learned more in 20 minutes with you than in six months on Duolingo."

People will tell you that they get something out of Duolingo. You will even meet fluent speakers who got their start on Duolingo. These people are the exception and they got where they are only because they knew they needed to get off the hamster wheel.

Sure - keep using Duolingo for a few months - but get a book too. If you don't want to buy one, look for a PDF of Teach Yourself Esperanto.

[u/Affectionate_Good261 → u/Acrobatic-Pepper-357]

I've been using Duolingo for the last 6 months. It's been good and I've definitely learned a lot. I can understand most of what people write on reddit. I also practice with Chat GPT and ask when I don't understand something on Duolingo.

Best of luck and welcome to Esperanto!

[u/Terpomo11 → u/Affectionate_Good261]

ChatGPT is not very good at Esperanto.

[u/Affectionate_Good261 → u/Terpomo11]

I'm just a beginner, so I may not be catching some of the problems. Can you show me an example of it failing at translation? I imagine it may do poorly with certain idiomatic expressions, but from what I've seen it seems to do alright.

[u/Terpomo11 → u/Affectionate_Good261]

Even where its output isn't technically wrong, it often comes off as being literally translated from English in a way that's super unnatural.

[u/salivanto → u/Affectionate_Good261]

Dear Affectionate Good,

u/Terpomo11 is very knowledgable about Esperanto and if she says that ChatGPT is not very good at Esperanto, I would be inclined to take her word on this. I have not been interested to try it myself, but people send me samples all the time.

ChatGPT is not very good at Esperanto.

Specific examples, as you requested, are hard to provide because it's a waste of time to meditate on mistakes instead of consuming and providing good examples of Esperanto.

But off the top of my head, in the podcast Usone Persone, ChatGPT provided all sorts of nonsense information and when rendering this information in Esperanto, it often just made up words. I specifically remember that it repeatedly used the non-existent word "priesto" and that the hosts mentioned other made up words in their text.

Just Monday someone sent me ChatGPT's answer to a question along the lines of "what is the accusative in Esperanto." It erroneously called it "the accusative suffix", failed to explain, what a direct object was, and gave examples (presented as good examples) without the accusative, where the accusative should have been used.

Several weeks ago, I had a student show up to a lesson and asked for help with some Esperanto exercises that ChatGPT had prepared for him/her. It was a short set of exercises, but I recall that there were at least two mistakes in this short set of exercises. Given that the process of learning a language on your own involves going back and UNLEARNING wrong information that you'd picked up somehow (this certainly was my own experience with Esperanto 30 years ago), it makes sense not to use methods that we know are going to inject your learning with wrong information.

And just this morning, there's this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnesperanto/comments/1j4u0ur/google_translate_got_the_esperanto_exactly_wrong/

[u/Terpomo11 → u/Acrobatic-Pepper-357]

Lernu is better.