White guy with “perfect Chinese” gets humiliated by Duolingo Chinese test

As someone who is a bilingual native Chinese speaker, your translations are more accurate than Duolingo's so...

You did great! Don’t beat yourself up over Duolingo being picky. Just hit the flag at the bottom “My answer should have been accepted as correct” next time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve yelled at that little owl myself! Haha

As a polyglot myself I can confirm it is a bigger challenge to interpret Duo’s English skills than it is to learn the target language 😂 Edit: Thanks so much for all the likes!

The problem with trying to get a perfect score on Duolingo is you have to guess what it thinks should be the right answer on less mature questions that haven't yet had the quirks ironed out.

Don't feel bad. Duolingo's translation modules are notoriously bad. You did amazingly well.

No humiliation here man, you got them all right. They were just being tight with the scoring!

That was fantastic! I'm on Unit 2 of Duolingo Chinese, and I understand your discrepancies with Duolingo's translations. Very well done, nothing to be embarrassed about at all. Keep up the good work!

Duolingo has a very sensitive system. Next time hit the “Report” on the bottom of the red screen when you get it wrong!

I'm just about to complete Unit 4 of chinese on duolingo, and I could get almost everything right on this test. Its actually insane, as 4 months ago I couldn't speak a single word on chinese. And its all thanks to this guy.

You're right to blame the program! On a lark, I tried testing out of French, a language I've been fluent in since childhood and have even taught professionally, and I ran into similar problems. Duolingo can be either frustratingly picky, as you discovered, or frustratingly vague. Like a sentence that should technically be "She is singing", they'll translate as "She sings." THOSE VERB TENSES ARE TECHNICALLY DIFFERENT. And sometimes those nuances do matter. Just one of the pitfalls of working with a program instead of a person. :)

You did it, Duolingo's fault for their only translation to them. You gave equivalent meanings!

If you had taken more of the tests before, you would have learned more of what they expect in translation. You got 100% for comprehension. The ones you missed were semantic.

As a Duolingo student for a year, I can tell you that the errors were Duolingo's, not yours. One thing a Duo student learns is how the responses were programmed in. You didn't know the rules of Duolingese. Great video!

I started Duolingo when I was stuck inside with Covid and now I've been doing it for over 500 days. I had a bit of a head start but I feel like I've learned a lot from the app. It's not perfect for sure but it has its advantages.

i've found that a lot of duolingo courses are still very much a work-in-progress, they still have issues that need ironing out by the team who works on them. their flagship courses i.e. spanish, german and french are much better, as more time has been spent developing them. i've been on the german course for a long time and there are still some issues, but i've noticed they go back and fix them as more time passes.

"I'm embarrassed...." says the guy who knows more languages than Doulingo has to offer...

The "3" you missed were correct, but the key was so specific.

You actually didn’t get anything wrong, the wording was off as per duolingo’s wording I guess. But whatever you translated was right, just said in a different way. Great job !!!

That was pretty amazing, because those of us learning from scratch on Duolingo have to learn how Duolingo thinks” about translation. You’re way too hard on yourself! And thanks for encouraging folks like me who are slogging away on Duolingo!

Wow! I didn’t realize you were expert level for speaking/reading. It’s always very inspiring to watch you!