As a warning to Duolingo-learners who may need to get into touch with English on any of those courses, I feel the need to keep warning you about the quality of their English versions wherever they make obviously serious mistakes.

This time, again on the English-German course, as a translation of ‘Kannst du bitte die Teller abtrocknen?’, ‘Can you dry the plates, please?’ is rejected. They put in ‘Can you please dry the plates?’ as the “correct” solution. Probably because in German ‘bitte’ has a rather fixed position. But it’s a lot more flexible in English!

So, a serious warning to all people still learning English: both questions mean the same. They are simply identical. If you’re an English teacher, please don’t hesitate to point this fact out to your students and warn them about any other potential mistakes they are sure to encounter on English courses from any other language – a few months ago, I simply couldn’t help but hold my head in my hands in disbelief when I saw what my friends’ kids were supposed to provide on the Dutch-English course as “correct”, in dozens of cases.

A similarly strange rejection presents itself at some point on the Hungarian-German course when the simple sentence, “Kérem aláírni” needs to be translated. As an answer, “Unterschreiben sie bitte” is rejected in favour of “Bitte unterschreiben”. Just because, I guess, the original Hungarian sentence started with the equivalent of “bitte”. I wouldn’t even complain if the first were not very often presented on the various German courses in either word order. Do some course authors have to be so stick-in-the-mud? Not to mention the almost zero probability of native Hungarians actually saying that sentence – even the roughest official would tell you, “Írja alá, kérem!”

On top of it all, such problems beg the question, to what extent learners can trust the correctness of their courses on any other languages. They may have built a reasonable system of courses but, in the small details, they are prone to having made lots of mistakes. Be careful and, if you suspect anything fishy, try to double-check. Especially, as I pointed out in my original post on them, their use of English tenses and their unfamiliarity with ‘he likes doing sg.’ v. ‘he likes to do sg.’, the latter having very limited use but coming up in their courses all the time in wrong contexts.

by P.S.