I was wondering what you all thought about Duolingo, or if you use it/contribute to it. I know it doesn't really make one fluent in a language, but it has helped me stay motivated. I'm taking the Norwegian Bokmål course. I wish there was an Icelandic one. They don't have any Asian languages which sucks. I was wondering if you knew about it, or if you are willing to contribute to it. I know you all learn languages as a hobby and although it's free and you don't get paid for it, I think other people would really appreciate it and would help a lot of people. All you have to do is apply for it in the language of the course, and translate your application. You don't exactly have to be qualified as a language teacher, but it is definitely a plus. As long as you're competent and willing to set up the course (they have the syllabus already you just have to fill in the words and create a bunch of practice sentences).
Please, if there are any Icelandic people out there, I really want to learn :p
Or any language.
Thank you.
Duolingo
Re: Duolingo
Funny you just posted this thread today, as I just logged in for the first time in probably about a year to clear my courses and start over. I definitely agree that it's more a matter of maintaining motivation to study and learning vocab than anything else really, but that's still something, and it's gotten like 10s of millions of people interested in learning languages so that's pretty awesome. I'm using it to maintain German (after restarting it and taking the placement test I placed out of 48 skills lol) and I started the Portuguese and Turkish ones too though I don't see myself getting very far with either, it's mostly just for fun.
As far as Asian languages go, besides Turkish which they have now, it looks like they are working on a Hindi and Vietnamese course in the next few months (estimated dates are November for Hindi and March for Vietnamese). I don't really think it's a good medium to learn Chinese and probably Japanese as well (at least, for learning the writing system, and there's not really much point in learning either of those without learning the writing system). From their incubator page it looks like they want to create courses for a bunch more languages but probably don't have the manpower to do it yet. I saw Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Indonesian, Punjabi, and Thai on the list of courses looking for contributors. They say that you don't have to be a native teacher but should at least be able to write really well in the language to be a contributor (and in fact they have to write like a little paragraph about why you want to contribute in both English and whatever language you want to help with)
As far as Asian languages go, besides Turkish which they have now, it looks like they are working on a Hindi and Vietnamese course in the next few months (estimated dates are November for Hindi and March for Vietnamese). I don't really think it's a good medium to learn Chinese and probably Japanese as well (at least, for learning the writing system, and there's not really much point in learning either of those without learning the writing system). From their incubator page it looks like they want to create courses for a bunch more languages but probably don't have the manpower to do it yet. I saw Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Indonesian, Punjabi, and Thai on the list of courses looking for contributors. They say that you don't have to be a native teacher but should at least be able to write really well in the language to be a contributor (and in fact they have to write like a little paragraph about why you want to contribute in both English and whatever language you want to help with)
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cunningham
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Re: Duolingo
They do have courses in Ukrainian and soon Russian, and you have to learn the alphabet. I don't see a problem in doing that with Japanese. All you have to do is change the keyboard layout on your computer and memorize hiragana and katakana. The hiragana will change to kanji, and if it's not the right character it has a whole database of other characters. So I propose a lesson on kana that you could test out of, and each lesson introduces new kanji. And you could toggle furigana below the kanji, or even toggle it to romaji. That would probably best if someone were to do it on mobile. Korean is easy too, but you would have to format your keyboard to be match the keys phonetically otherwise you would have to memorize another keyboard. I can see some typing games to get more points.
And Chinese is going to be harder, but the Chinese have managed to do this; though I think there should implement a thing where you draw the character. I know programs that do this even for mobile.
Duolingo is basically memorizing and constructing sentences. They are pretty weak with conversational speech, but I've learned more vocabulary than I ever would by myself. The gamification aspect really gets me going to.
And Chinese is going to be harder, but the Chinese have managed to do this; though I think there should implement a thing where you draw the character. I know programs that do this even for mobile.
Duolingo is basically memorizing and constructing sentences. They are pretty weak with conversational speech, but I've learned more vocabulary than I ever would by myself. The gamification aspect really gets me going to.