Hola C
I’d like to follow up on Inma’s response to your earlier comments and to the ones you make in your most recent post.
Are we supposed to believe that a native speaker wrote this?
Please be assured that all the teachers are native speakers with extensive experience teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The same is true for our French website. You can view the profile of every team member on our team page.
the connectors […] to a native they sound like Google Translate […] most commas are misplaced […] The verb tenses used are also wrong.
We take quality very seriously and I asked the teachers to review this text in the light of your comments. The result was very firm: none of the tenses are grammatically incorrect, none of the connectors are incorrect; however of the 13 commas contained in the text, we do see that 3 are misplaced, and also that we need to add 3 others.
When we discussed why anyone would write in with such strength of feeling about this, given our findings above, we concluded it must be to do with the way the text is constructed as Inma explained. You sound like you might be a teacher; if you are, then you can appreciate how difficult it is to create content that illustrates specific grammatical points. It’s easy to just create a list of unconnected sentences, but putting together a text with internal coherence and meaning is in itself an artificial process. The results of this process can also sound more or less artificial and can therefore be more or less successful. We strive to tick the successful box, we are genuinely disappointed to see we have not done so in this instance. To this end, I invite you to look at all our resources, not just this one exercise. Some of these bilingual reading and listening exercises are based on texts created for specific grammatical purposes, others are based on videos, perhaps this one about Eva Hache would be more suited? We also offer fill-in-the-blanks exercises, language learning tips as well as our grammar lessons with a recommended studyplan powered by A.I. software that identifies what students know, don't know and have mis-learned. All these resources are FREE; our paid subscribers have further benefits including writing practice and dictations.
We trust that you will base your opinion of the quality of our offer on the full range of resources we provide, rather than on this one exercise. In addition, it would be unfair to our very capable French sister site to have their excellent resources evaluated on the basis of one Spanish exercise.
We very much hope that you will continue learning French with us.
Kind regards
Shui