About the Refold core vocabulary decks
I was just browsing the Refold core vocabulary decks and something really rubbed me the wrong way. Apparently, some of them were made using recordings from native speakers (e.g., Spanish, German, Czech), while others use AI-generated audio (e.g., Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, Swedish). Here's the thing: it's absolutely baffling to me that they chose not to hire native speakers for all of their decks.
Robot voices are not native speakers, no matter how good they are. It's wild that Refold heavily stresses the importance of input while using audio that is an approximation of native-speaker pronunciation for their core vocabulary decks, instead of the actual pronunciation of native speakers. For some languages with huge dialectal variation or with complex phonological inventories, like Dutch or Mandarin Chinese, this could be an even bigger issue.
Can we have native-speaker audio for all of the decks, not just some of them? This really feels like asking for the bare minimum.