Adding "rare" languages

Open Forum
1

I have no idea what it takes to add languages to lingq. I am in the process of trying to learn Hmong (Hmoob). I am told Hmoob is a “rare” language. I have yet to find a learning service that has the Hmoob language. It would be excellent if more of these rare languages were exposed more to perhaps, make them less rare. I will be working with Moses McCormick regarding the language and maybe he could do something with lingq and incorporate Hmong.

Thanks

2

Moses McCormick is a fantastic polyglot with some interesting things to say about learning and I share his passion.

Steve said to me, when I mentioned Yiddish, that it certainly could get online provided 3 requirements were met.

  1. Content
  2. Online dictionaries
  3. People who want to learn it.

I don’t have any real hope that Yiddish will make its way here. But that is something I’m find with. As to Hmong, sadly I think it’s in an even worse position than Yiddish. Mainly because it has little literature and certainly very few courses.

3

Perhaps Moses himself has some ideas about where to access content: podcasts, lessons, songs and what not. You can always ask native speakers to record basic dialogues (e.g. “Who is she?”, “Eating out”). That’ll keep most people busy for quite some time.

4

We hope to be able to have any and all languages on LingQ sometime in the future. Hopefully sooner rather than later. At that time, we would be completely relying on members to create content for these languages. I don’t know if an online Hmong dictionary exists but that could be a stumbling block. It could be a while building up our own dictionary of hints in a language like that.

5

I thank you all for the replies. I have posted a bunch of links I found regarding Hmong and language learning in general. I will continue my studies as is.

http://www.uwgb.edu/hmongstudies/Hmong_Studies_Courses.htm

http://www.hmongdictionary.com/tonyform.html

http://zoosiab.com/join.php?cmd=please_login
http://hmongza.com/
http://faculty.matcmadison.edu/kher/hmong_phrases.htm
http://www.hmongabc.com/store/home.php?cat=264
http://hmong-culture.com/?page_id=9
http://www.chaomoua.com/hmongdictionary/
http://hmong.lomation.com/reader/index.php
http://www.mong.ws/
http://www.hmongabc.com/store/home.php
http://ferazelhosting.net/~bryce/hmong.html

http://www.thelinguist.blogs.com/

6

I’m on vacation…so I’ve been playing around with typing Hmong content into my English slot. (No recording, by the way.) I was using an offline dictionary to look up and enter meanings into lingqs. Suddenly I noticed that, on the side, Babylon was sometimes looking up words in a Hmong dictionary for me and giving me the right meanings. Not always, but sometimes. Is there a way that I can make this happen all the time?

Sometimes nothing showed up, even though I was looking for a common word and had clicked on Babylon. Other times Wikipedia seemed to get in the way with something that was not Hmong. (That’s what I was expecting would happen from the beginning. That’s why I wasn’t paying any attention, at first, to the dictionary suggestions.)

7

The way Babylon works is that it searches all of its available dictionaries for the selected term and presents all the results it finds. It must therefore, have a Hmong dictionary in its dictionary list and it shows this result when it can find the selected term in that dictionary. It doesn’t show the dictionary if it can’t find the term which happens often if the dictionary isn’t very complete which is likely the case with the Hmong dictionary.

8

Thanks, Mark. It mustn’t be very complete at all if it doesn’t have the word for “we”! Anyway, I’ve been having fun with this.