Duolingo discrepancies between furigana and audio

Having done the correct format for dates, both months and days of the months, this week was very timely, as the Duolingo lesson today had the wrong furigana, but the correct audio (which is often a miracle - their most frequent flaw is to have the wrong audio for a symbol, particularly annoying when they show four new kanji & ask you which one is x - and you tap each of the kanji to hear the sound, and none of them is x... And it doesn't seem to mater how many times that you report that the audio is wrong, it does not get fixed).

I sat there for quite a while looking at the kanji symbols with their furigana and the word pieces*, and going "nothing there sounds remotely like shiga...? shinga..? shika...? shige...?" and replaying the audio to be sure exactly which pronunciation I was hearing (since I initially assumed I must be hearing wrong, and the answer really was down there...)., and then instead of looking at the text to choose from, I just listened to the sentence and then I really looked at the broken up pieces... and, thanks to the timing of our class on dates, it all became clear... 

The furigana was wrong on the kanji for the fourth month... it had よんがつ.  They had at least kept those two kanji together as one unit - although it would have been more forgivable if they hadn't kept them together.   And the day part of the date, had been split into two kanji, so you had 一 labeled as  いち & 日 labeled as ひ (not even にち for one day's duration) - and you need them together and in a date context to label them as ついたち.  

Their habit of splitting things up to make you think more about how things are constructed (I'm being charitable here, since it looks more like they randomly chop things up like a jigsaw puzzle to increase difficulty, not to increase thinking around the language nor the recognition of patterns), seriously backfires when you need two (or more) kanji together to get a pronunciation for a word.

And here's a link to that audio -  I recorded it on my phone & uploaded it to my google drive to share - https://drive.google.com/file/d/16KWYVDLIkC6B3Eo6avpP3o6qe9zrQfOS/view?usp=sharing

They rarely explain things till long after you need to know them, if ever, so I can see people being very lost on this for a long time.

They still haven't explained why they are choosing which parts of verbs to put in their "which of these 4 kanji is x" questions, or in their "match up these items on the left with items on the right" type questions (where sometimes the item on the right is the romaji for the pronunciation of the hiragana and sometimes it is the meaning of the word in English and sometimes it is the hiragana for the kanji they have on the left... but I very recently realised that they always have the verb stem for those when they have a verb in there - but I would never have realised without doing the JCCC courses, and reaching grammar patterns where we need the stems, and starting to look at the stems.  They're frustrating and make things harder for people.

 

All the lovely footnotes... today's post is a little like an iceberg, way more below the waterline... 12 footnotes, which I think is a record.  It would have been 13 if I had correctly attributed the "It's idiomatic, bizatch." quote...

* They rarely give you a whole word, to make you put them together and presumably think more about the words and spellings without requiring people to have a Japanese keyboard/install the language options on their tech, but... that approach definitely has drawbacks.  For one thing, as I discovered in this case, they also split up kanji that should be going together and that change their pronunciation when they are together.  Sorry for the spoiler there...  I knew about it for them splitting up hiragana for ages & I think it is a bad idea or at least implemented badly - if they just split a verb stem from its ending, it might teach people about verb stems and how you interchange endings, but they do not just stop there, they split the endings! This splitting up is particularly annoying when they split the end of a word up.  They tend to leave masu together as one piece, but mashita gets split into mashi and ta, and masen gets split into mase and n.  

This is bad for many reasons  - it is really easy to forget to grab the n when it is sitting off on its own and you have already grabbed mase - those items are bonded together in my head, and if I were writing it by hand, there is no way I would forget to write the n there, so you get dinged and lose a point for something that you know the grammar of.  That doesn't encourage you to remember that grammar correctly, it just puts an additional bar in the way of your success for no reason.

And worse still, in my opinion**, is the fact that it breaks up the audio into separate pieces - when you tap on each piece to add it to the sentence, it gives you the audio for that piece, so you get the sound for mase & then the sound for n on its own, rather than merged together as they would be spoken.  It's still worse for mashi and ta, because it gives you a fully pronounced mashi, and then ta.  Because of the elision that happens in Japanese***, this can leave an element being pronounced very wrong - in this case, mashi gets pronounced as mashi, and then you add the ta on separately.  If the user doesn't have any other exposure to Japanese speech, other than the rare listening exercises in Duolingo, it will take them forever to correct this pronunciation issue.

** which is obviously the only one that matters... and before you say that is arrogant of me, let me point out that it's my blog, for me to talk, so obviously it's the only one that matters here.

*** There may be some regional accents where this doesn't happen, and I know that there are some cases**** where pitch accent wars with the usual i/u unvoiced surroundings pronunciation rule#.  It's also possibly that elision is not quite the right technical term, but if an i or an u is surrounded by unvoiced consonants (or the end of a sentence - silence is automatically unvoiced ;)), they are "devoiced".  For instance, "masu" gets pronounced as "mass", shita gets pronounced more like "shta"##.

**** no clue what they are, and we haven't really done pitch accents, it is marked in the book in the vocab sections, but finding the key to what the bar over the letters meant was difficult and it's not been enforced.  The closest to it that we have come was an answer to a question that I emailed sensei to ask for the recent quiz about how would I have known which picture of two to pick for the audio kiteimasu and how to tell that apart from from kiteimasu (one picture was of a person coming into a room & the other was of a person putting on a jacket) - apart from the fact that I hadn't picked up on that directional verbs ONLY do the "I have done this directional action and I am still where it left me" type of teimasu statement, rather than doing that AS WELL AS the other teimasu types/meanings, sensei said that Japanese people would hear a difference between the two, so I assume that the pitch accent is different on them (which is a weakness of Jisho - I don't recall seeing pitch marks on there, but then if they marked the dictionary form, it would presumably change for the other forms and then be marked wrong... they would have to mark it on each form. They do have audio for the dictionary form of many of the words, but not for the inflections, and going to listen to kiku and kiru will not help in this case...).

# I could do a whole separate rant on the fact that so many people, both online and in textbooks, do not teach this rule.  They tend to just say that all of the sounds in the hiragana syllabary are always pronounced exactly the same way, so Japanese is really easy, unlike English###, and then say "but there are these 1000 or so exceptions to learn....".  Except that there aren't, because there is a simple rule for them, which I mentioned in footnote *** above.

## which, thank Og for that, because one of my concerns when originally reading romaji and before learning pronunciation and hiragana was that my inner five year old was going to spend all of its time giggling at all the shite and shita words I could see... Thankfully, as soon as I switch to hiragana, that kills that brain link, and it doesn't get pronounced that way anyway.

### Which is totally true on the English part - it is as though it was assembled by a committee of artists over a couple of thousand years and each committee member insisted on putting in their favourite inspirational influences, so sometimes you have a Greek pronunciation or plural, and sometimes you have a roman one, or Anglo Saxon, or French, or some other language that either conquered what is now the UK, or was conquered by them and had their language ransacked for spare change (and everything else they owned too, for that matter, which is way too large a topic to get into here) #### That's ignoring the times that extra subcommittees have then gone in and changed things because this should be an X (when it wasn't an x & they just broke it and made it harder for everyone... - there's a couple of good videos on that on YouTube from Rob Words - https://youtu.be/JkdcYYduUeM on "ough" pronunciation in English & https://youtu.be/j07f-cKWRtk - the men who ruined English spelling. He has other neat videos about the English language and the origin of words on his channel too).

#### And don't get me started about the question of when has a word been in the language long enough to get treated as an English word and follow its rules rather than the original language source's rules for pluralization - you only have to look at the poor octopus, and the grammar wars over whether it is octopi or octopuses - and it is neither if you want the original source, because it was a Greek word, so it becomes octopodes (Latin goes with ped for feet, so we get pedal from there, but Greek was pous, same root word that we get podiatrist from) - but people keep beating people over the head with it, claiming that their (usually incorrect) plural is correct because it is based on Latin and the word comes from that (which, as we know, it doesn't...), when the word has been in use in English for so long that it is eminently reasonable to say "Sod off, this is an English word now, and I'm going to treat it as such and say octopuses.  You understood what I said, you're just using it as an excuse to language police me, and belittle me and not listen to what I said, only how I said it" - which is a whole other rant entirely^.  Same with index, appendix, and phoenix.  Most people tend to say indexes, appendixes (usually only when referring to books, since vanishingly few people are unlucky enough to have two of them in their bodies), and, if there were ever more than one phoenix at a time, phoenixes - but the plurals from the original grammar source would be indices, appendices, and phoenices, and you'll still find these in text fairly often, but very rarely in speech^^.

^ There is definitely a case to be made for learning and using the accepted grammar of a language - I'm not disagreeing with that.  I mean, I have a whole blog about learning language & grammar, and the thoughts that provokes and realisations when the penny drops on grammar points...  Using the accepted/mainstream grammar makes it clearer and easier for other people to understand you and to be sure that was indeed what you meant to say, but languages are also living things and change and grow over time, and you can play with language too - deliberately break the rules of grammar to make something stand out and be more shocking.  But when people do it in books, or self proclaimed language experts or literary types do it, they tend to get lauded for it.  If certain other types of people do it, they get picked on, or treated like they are an idiot, whether it is because of their regional accent or their dialect form of the language, or their first, second or third immigrant, mother tongue accent leaving an imprint on their speech, and sometimes, their grammar. It's used as an excuse to mark people as less than and to other them.  I'm lucky, because as a first generation immigrant, I could have had a hard time from that, but the majority of American people like the English accent & I often get told that I have a neat accent (even if they think it is Australian a lot of the time...), but people from a lot of other countries are not as lucky.  This is the short & less ranty version of this rant, so be grateful that I'm sparing you...

^^ which is an interesting tie to Japanese, where some things only tend to be done in speech and some in text, like n or no, where no tends to get used in writing, and n in speech - but of course, we are using the n form in our writing demonstrating that we know it, and messing up that link in our brains.  And there's probably a difference between literary style writing and regular, everyday, writing anyway...  Sadly, my vocabulary isn't advanced enough to know that, even if my grammar rules are steadily stacking up.  The grammar step is a much smaller one than the vocabulary one in terms of volume. But without it... *shudder* I can't even read manga yet, even if I cheat and use google translate to give me the kanji that I don't recognize yet.  Too many vocabulary holes to get trapped in - and that's even without considering things that are idiomatic and that you will never translate without the context^^ - like the title やがてきみになる (or やがて君になる as the cover has it) - やがて is an adverb & can variously be "(1) before long, soon, shortly, (2) nearly, almost, (3) eventually, finally, in the end".  The observant amongst you will notice that these are rather opposite meanings.  きみ is a pronoun, and is familiar language for "you" - so we never tend to use it, because a) we're being polite, not familiar (& I'm not going to get in a discussion about gendered language, because this is already far too long a post considering the original tiny issue... not that that has ever stopped me before ;)), and b) pronouns only tend to get used in Japanese when absolutely necessary to avoid confusion about who did what to whom, and c) most forms of 'you' seem to be rude in polite conversation (or could imply that you are dating/married) - far safer to avoid them entirely). The next word に is easy - it's one hiragana symbol, and a particle, and could mean any of: into, at a specific time/place, to or towards, for a specific purpose, because of, by or from, as (in the role of), per, or even be the number two, not a particle - so that really narrows the meaning down... And then なる- which we have done in grammar recently for change of state structures, and is the dictionary/plain form of the verb to become, to change into.  So it could mean changing into you...?  And which of the two protagonists is changing into the other?  Or are both changing into each other?  And this gets translated in the English title as "Bloom Into You"... And that is just the title.  It's idiomatic, bizatch...

^^^ Rather like "Darmok when the walls fell"...^^^^

^^^^ Yes, that is a heavy context item and it is intended to be - there is a whole episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on contextual languages, where an alien race speaks in metaphor for their plain, everyday, language, and so they have never been able to negotiate a peace treaty or even work together, because "Darmok when the walls fell" means nothing without the context, even if you understand every word that it is made of.  The whole language is idiomatic (and I always used to wonder how did they tell the stories to give people the context if everything was high context... but that is a problem for another day).  It's a very good episode despite that niggling question of mine, and might be worth a rewatch, given the constant discussion of Japanese being a high context language (which, as a student, I appreciate, because you can often get away with saying "先生は..." and trailing off, instead of having to remember the grammar of the preceding question, when you are polite and return it... Except for when sensei says that they appreciate you being high context, but you really should repeat it for practice (because they know what you are doing and why) - and it's now longer ago and your brain has had more time to forget the patterns and correct particles that it had desperately grabbed out of the question & thought it had been clasping tightly to, like a security blanket....