Issues with Spanish

[Timothée Giet]

Hi José,

Thanks for your mail. I'll answer each point below.

Le 19/11/2022 à 10:02, José G Moya Y. a écrit :
>  Hi!
>
> I'm running a basic level Spanish class. In that class, most students 
> have literacy on French or English and know western alphabet, but a 
> few of them do not.
>
> I had tested gcompris years ago, when my nephews were in early stages 
> of school. So I considered using gcompris with those needing improved 
> support with alphabet.
>
> I installed gcompris android 2.4 from F-Droid and tested it in 
> advance. I'm unsure about gcompris being attactive for adult people 
> but the main flaws I found were these:
>
> First,  the Spanish voices have wrong names for the letters. Those 
> could came from hypercorrection. "V" is called "ve" (with labio-dental 
> consonant), while in standard Spanish there are no labio-dentals ("b" 
> and "v" have same sound), so "ve baja" (uttered [be baxa]) or "uve" 
> (uttered [ube]) should be used. "Q" is called "ke", while standard 
> name is "cu".

I'm not a native-Spanish speaker, so I've checked some references on the 
web and it seems right. For "V", I guess we should use "uve" to avoid 
confusion with "B". And for "W" I guess it should also be updated to 
"uve doble". For "Q", indeed it looks like it should be "cu". If you can 
provide recordings for these 3 letters, we can replace those voices 
(currently all the letters for Spanish are recorded with women's voices, 
so if you can get these 3 letters also recorded by a woman it would be 
more consistent).


>
> Second, images for word learning are a little English-centered. The 
> first stage of "name the word" has some meaning in English (english 
> names took from github source):
> "mail box", "sailing boat", "lamp", "postcard","fishing boat", "bulb"
> (each one starts with a different letter from alphabet)
>
> 	
>
> While in Spanish it has no sense:
> Buzón - Yate - Lámpara - Postal - Barco de pesca - Bombilla
> (three of them start with same letter).

The activity "Name the image" is not made to have words starting with 
different letters on each level. You can see that even in English, all 
the other levels have at least 2 words starting with same letter. The 
fact that first level doesn't have 2 words starting with same letter in 
English is a coincidence.


>
> Also, some colors in the set of colors are rarely used (but it could 
> be a ethnocentric point of view, since color sets change region to 
> region). When I was a small child in Spain, I rarely used "púrpura" 
> ("purple"). I used "morado" (mulberry/purple). Saying "púrpura" was as 
> un-natural as saying "magenta" instead of "purple" is on English. But 
> as I say I'm unsure about the color set children learn in different 
> Spanish-Speaking countries, specially after translated baby tv shows 
> from the USA became popular.

Color names can often be controversial, yes. I see that translation 
websites indeed give as first result "morado" for "purple". So we can 
probably change it. For this, we need to get the translation updated in 
the .po file, and a new voice file (same instructions apply as for 
recording letters).


>
> Yours,
>
> José Gabriel Moya
> Madrid, Spain.

Regards,

Timothée