Dammit* Duolingo!

 

They have a “review your words” section and this was in it tonight…


Seriously, it wants to teach you “half” as “thirty”.


There is one and only one specific context where it means thirty but even then, it’s thirty by context, because half is like an operation or a variable in maths - it could literally be any number (except for when it’s explicitly 0.5 ;)).


And the one context when it could be thirty is n時半 - n hour and half an hour - which you could call half past n, or, in English, n:30.  But it’s contextual , it’s only thirty because there are 60 minutes in an hour and half of 60 is 30…


I’m much more likely to say “half past two” than 2:30**, so 30 for it would never have occurred to me, and certainly not in isolation.  It’s awful! 


If you’re going to make it 30, you need counter units, it’s not 30 in a void, it would need 分, you wouldn’t have a thirty in isolation in Japanese. And then you’re at 〜時三十分, which is a stupid mouthful when you could have just said 〜時半


And it is only one context where this happens - even though there’s 60 seconds in a minute and half of that would give you 30 seconds, if you try to do that, you get 半分 and that’s literally half, not half a minute…***

They’re teaching people something bad and to recognize a symbol as something that it only means in a special edge case, when the half meaning is valid in all the cases.


Dammit, Duolingo!!!****




* I think this is my first ever footnote from a title, but I needed to point out that this is the cleaned up version of the title. It’s as polite as I could bring myself to go…

** possibly to avoid the dentist pun (when is it time to go to the dentist? 2:30. Try saying it out loud ;)).  Maybe because I grew up analog, not digital…

*** ok, you would actually do 〜分半 (~ minutes and 30 seconds/ ~.5 minutes) but  a) I couldn’t resist that half and minute link joke and b) it’s important to note that 半 has to be in the suffix position after a counter marker to mean that, and they’re teaching it all wrong, nothing about the counter markers or positions and they’re going to confuse people!!!!  On its own, it’s the kanji for half!

**** Still cleaned up. I share these links with my sensei. I’m not going to use the language I really want to about this. Ironic, when studying and blogging about language. Let’s just say that Duolingo is provoking me to some ancient Anglo-Saxon and you’ll have to excuse my French… 🤣

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