bounded in a nutshell with three people who won't stop introducing themselves

[cimorene]

One of the main problems with Duolingo Welsh is that, aside from (your name here), it only has three 4 regular characters: Owen, Dylan, Megan and Morgan. At this point I am heartily sick of Owen, Dylan, and the M-gans, and would actually enjoy the exercises more if the only character was the dragon (they do introduce the dragon early and let you address it occasionally, but it shows up like a tenth as often as these guys).

Of course, aside from using the dragon, or multiple dragons, or letting animals become characters... or inanimate objects like the Dutch course, which has you talking to and as a sentient apple... they could just give it a larger pool of names to work with?! And I really don't understand why you would use 4. It seems like such a strange and arbitrary number. It's definitely more than one, or one per gender, but it's also smaller than the smallest study group I've ever been in...?!

They also introduce the Duolingo owl later, naming it Dewi Lingo, but you never talk to it or as it - it's always in the third person, like visiting it or its office or its party (or going swimming with it, weirdly enough... since it's an owl. Do owls swim? ... Okay, I googled it. Owls CAN swim, although evidently it's not something they're seen doing very often).

The course seems to be making some effort not to play to gender stereotypes with the sentences about professions and hobbies and the like, but then it's got one (2?) female character and two (3?) male ones... which is arguably only a difference of one, but is also 100% greater. (Honestly not sure how to count the owl or the dragon, so I'll ignore them.) (The gender context for Morgan is a bit uncertain thus far. )

And also, again, 4 is just boring.

Comments

[phosfate]

And tennis. And grandmas.

[cimorene]

Actually Welsh started by introducing walking, running, and swimming, and then squash and rugby, but those are the only ones we've seen so far and the rugby is far less common. Talking about playing squash allllllll the time. I'd only ever encountered playing squash as a signal that a fictional character was comically old and/or wealthy before.

[spark]

The squash all the time is really odd, I suspect it might be an artifact of a generic underlying Duo course structure? Similarly weird how much course time focuses on whales and tigers and elephants compared to sheep and cows. (Lions are valid though, every town has Y Llew Goch, Y Llew Du, â Y Llew Gwyn!)

[cimorene]

My main thought is what whales, tigers and elephants are relevant with small children because they're popular or 'famous'... though in that case, they should include like... panda and penguin too.