The lack of the word “and” in the number there made this parse really weirdly in my brain.
Instead of “I play with 615 giraffes”, I read it as “I play with 600 15-giraffes”. I don’t know what a 15-giraffe is, but it sounds like it might be an unstable isotope or something.
Yeah, as far as I can tell it’s normal in America to say 615 as “six hundred fifteen”, whereas the rest of the anglosphere would say “six hundred and fifteen”.
The fact that the line break happened to be right where the word “and” was missing probably made it even harder to parse correctly.
Funny enough, I was taught that including the “and” was explicitly wrong in first grade! (American here)
It may be a regional thing. I learned English while I was in the states and we learnt “six hundred and fifteen” if you’re saying the digit-place words (hundred, thousand, etc), but “six fifteen” would also be correct. “Six hundred fifteen” was acceptable, but not preferred, and “six and fifteen” is not used.
All I see are math symbols.
I went to a certain military training school with some linguists, and they told me they had face-to-face proficiency tests like quarterly.
The tests would start with normal benign conversational topics, like one would expect, but then escalate to weirdness from there.
Things like “Are you more worried about the recent nuclear-waste-being-found-in-kayaks issue, or the ongoing chihuahuas-shitting-out-whole-uncured-meat-products problem?”. The point was to see if the linguist could piece together information from non-standard esoteric shit.
Those 615 giraffes look like they’d fit right into such a test.
I believe these are put in place to actually test your knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar, vs just being good at memorizing the handful of simple conversational samples.
The problem is that it isn’t natural speech
Realistically who are you going to say that to in the language you are learning
While you can use textbooks to help it it better to mostly learn from natural speech / conversation because no one speaks in text book speech
That’s the best part, when you meet people of the language you are learning you can say the odd quirky shit from Duolingo and they’ll absolutely love it. What, you are an apple?? A dog is wearing three pullovers?? More relevant for beginners who can say a handful of stuff but can’t yet hold a proper conversation.
It’s not like Duolingo is just randomly generated sentences that make no sense either. They are carefully sprinkled in to break up the routine and make it a bit of fun.
What am I looking at here?? Its all Greek to me
