You are all refering to South Park which was meant to be in poor taste and was actually supposed to point out how out of touch some people are. In South Park the creators made fun of everything and everybody - and it was supposed to shock and offend but in order to show how stupid the offensive taste was. That is why they put the "fat, little Jew boy" in it and they made fun of Jesus and Mohamed and the Pope and Tom Cruise, etc. etc. etc. I taught high school at the time and the kids in my class where too immature to understand the point so they adopted a lot of the South Park attitudes as bone fide. Then the series was translated into German and I met German speakers who emulated the simplicities totally unaware of how tasteless they were. That is also reflected in the way Europeans use terms like the English word for fiki. I saw a boy in Germany with a t-shirt that said: Give me a cream pie. Poor dude! I hope he didn't wear the rag on a trip to the states. He would have had a bunch of come ons but not the ones he wanted, I am afraid.
All language has to be understood in context - I think that this was the point that the US Supreme Court made about our healthcare on Thursday.
I think that Duolingo wants to be "cool" and "unstuffy" and so there is an attempt made at using "cool" language. That is actually a good thing. Language study should be fun and not boring. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of stuffy "pedagogues" who want school to be a drag. When I was teaching Spanish I brought in teen magazines and suff about cars and fashion and stars. The other teachers were not too happy about this at first. But my kids found Spanish more interesting that way. Language is for communication - of facts and feelings. It is not about getting all the cross-word puzzles right. Good luck, Duo dudes!

Vestitor:I can't believe that. I've even seen people in American films use it this way, so it must have some traction in the culture.

Well, either way, I'm thankful that particular usage is going away.......or at least I don't hear it much anymore (maybe because I cause such a stink when it's used like that around me).

Vestitor:Are you a Quaker or something similar? What's all the thee-ing and thou-ing for?

See my profile

robbkvasnak:I would like to point out again as I have many times before: language is not mathematics. ... Human language is remarkable because it allows for "displacement" i.e. refering to things that are not present or which/who may not exist (like "unicorns"). In human language we can insinuate things that we are not talking about or we may remind others of things that we do not intend to refer to. This is hardly possible in mathematical equations to build computer programs. I do not know C+ but I have the impression that one must remain rather straight forward when using it. Computers do not have fuzzy brains. Humans using language do.

Your point is well taken, however I think you may be defending a position that (at least I) am not taking. People are free to use language how they please and couch their words in literary devices. This makes it rich and satisfying. This is different from expecting a certain degree of scholarly consensus about the way a word is used before including it in a beginner's language course. This is just good pedagogy. This is my only interest. I am not suggesting we embark on a project to "program completely" our language. You make some good points and express yourself well, but in the end you seem to be attacking a straw man.

Secondly, as someone with a math/physics background I can tell you that your characterization is not quite on the mark, in fact it is almost the inverse of the reality. Everything in mathematics doesn't exist. Mathematical ideas are abstractions. A unicorn is a perfect example of something that mathematics is very good at: it is a well defined entity that may represent certain features of reality but is not, of itself, real. Whether a "unicorn" appears in your head merely depends on whether the constituent ideas that make up a unicorn are already present in your mind as sense memories or intuition. The same can be said of a polygon or an integral. Also, and I'm not going to expend the energy necessary to fully defend this position, but: there are a wide swath of scholars who would argue that mathematics and programming languages are fundamentally just extensions of human language capacity, like any other language. They have some unique features, but are not fundamentally different.

Also: C++ results in code that is as straightforward or complex as the use case and the programmer desire: just like the Universal Grammar of natural languages yields the variety of tongues extant (although machine language would be a better analogy). Ask a C++ programmer about the possibilities of "pointers."

Also: Computers may or may not have "fuzzy brains." So called fuzzy logic involves various ways of including the "excluded middle"

One problem with trying to deduct language from logic, is that people do not speak in "logical" ways if one is to take each word verbatim. An utterance is not just the equivalent of its parts. This is a big problem for first-time second language learners. I speak five - maybe six - languages with native fluency (that is an expression that is not 100% definable) and I have been able to do this by simply accepting that that is how something is said. "That's for the birds" could mean that you are referring to some food that you intend to put out for birds to eat. But it generally means: that is poppycock (whatever poppycock is). "That's a crock!" is the short form of the more standard: "That's a crock of shit" which does not mean that it is a container of defication but rather a lie.
If you want to read up on this, there are two books that would be of great interest to you: The Unforlding of Language by Guy Deutscher and Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things by Marcel Danesi.
As Vygotsky points out, language is a social act. This idea is more profoundly studied in Bakhtin with his concenpt of audience.And as our Supreme Court recently pointed out in the judgment handed down concerning our health care, langueage must be understood in context. "By the state" seems clear, but it is open to interpretation.

robbkvasnak:One problem with trying to deduct language from logic . . .

Again, you seem to be arguing with yourself. I, nor anyone else here, I believe, is arguing what you are describing. It almost seems as if you are saying that we can't apply logic to the study of language, simply because language arises illogically. This would invalidate virtually all academic pursuits. If that is so, why are you using logic to defend your point? It just seems rather solipsistic. The other option is that you think absolutely everything conceivable should be taught in a beginning course on a subject. This is obviously intractable. Some standard must be adopted. I am merely arguing that the apparent standard adopted in this specific instance may not be the best one.

Back to the original post... I have spotted a few points which I would have wanted to point out to the Duolingo team. Usually though, I am either using Duolingo on my cellphone, which doesn't have the reporting feature, or I have been in too much of a hurry to progress on to the next sentence and pressed Enter twice to get there.

I must mention though, in agreement with others in this thread, that the Duolingo team have done an outstanding job and probably advanced the exposure of Esperanto in a way few others could have acheived. So I can forgive the odd glitch in the English translations - if it had been left to me then the course would still be in the Duolingo incubator!

I am glad that Duolingo has a life. Some people don't.