Our goal is to have audio in all of the stories we publish, to best match the Duolingo experience, and to give learners practice at listening comprehension. But we can probably all agree that teaching incorrect pronunciation is worse than having no listening practice at all!

After experimenting with the different TTS services and voices we have available (and the above tips and tricks), if you cannot find any that correctly pronounce your language, there are some edits you will need to make to your stories. Converting the "listening" questions to similar "comprehension" questions will give readers a better learning experience.

If you want to make it easy to convert back to listening exercises when TTS voices become available in the future 🤞🏽, you can make a duplicate of the exercise, comment-out #the lines of the old one, and convert the new one.

Convert "Arrange" to "Point to Phrase"

• Change the exercise title from [ARRANGE] to [POINT_TO_PHRASE].
• Change the prompt-line from > Tap what you hear to > Choose the option that means "."
• Remove the square brackets [ ] around the "Speaker"-line.
• Select which word/phrase you will ask the learner to recognize, and mark it with a plus-sign inside the parentheses: (+CorrectAnswer).
• Add the hint for that word/phrase in the prompt-line: > Choose the option that means "From~Language Hint."

Old:

#[ARRANGE]
#> Tap what you hear
#Speaker100: [(Babam)  (Kanadalı)   (ve)   (annem)  (Türkiyeli).]
#~      my~father (is)~from~Canada   and   my~mother   (is)~from~Turkey

New:

[POINT_TO_PHRASE]
> Choose the option that means "my~mother."
Speaker100: (Babam)  (Kanadalı)   (ve)   (+annem)  (Türkiyeli).
~      my~father (is)~from~Canada   and   my~mother   (is)~from~Turkey

Convert "Select Phrase" to "Continuation"

• Change the exercise title from [SELECT_PHRASE] to [CONTINUATION].
• Change the prompt-line from > Select the missing phrase to > What comes next?
• Change your alternate answers from the "sound-alikes" useful on the listening exercise to answers that will not make sense in your sentence.
• Add hint-lines after each of the multiple choice answers, like: ~ From~Language Hint (using tildes and pipes as needed to align the hints and answers).

Old:

#[SELECT_PHRASE]
#> Select the missing phrase
#Speaker507: Bugün [önemli~bir maçım] var.
#~           today an~important my~game I~have
#+ önemli bir maçım
#- önemli bir maçımız
#- önemsiz bir maçım

New:

[CONTINUATION]
> What comes next?
Speaker507: Bugün [önemli~bir maçım] var.
~           today an~important my~game I~have
+ önemli~bir maçım
~ an~important my~game
- mor kurbağalarım
~ purple my~frogs
- altı çarşambam
~ six my~Tuesday