Whilst I can understand the desire for wanting more content before launching a language on lingQ. I have noticed on the forums that some individuals have waited years for access to languages they wanted. My suggestion is alpha languages. They would feature dictionaries and MAYBE a news feed. That’s it, make it something people sign up for so lingQ doesn’t get ‘flooded’ with them or ‘hide them’ in a menu. Users can be encouraged to add to the public library as they use these alpha languages. With that, hopefully, you as the lingQ team will consider the language supported enough to consider the language worthy of beta or even full support.
This will solve for the biggest issue lingQ has in my opinion. It takes time to populate definitions for languages. Everything else is a marginal issue. If users use alpha languages you could even consider paying for translations of mini stories and grammar guides and thus popular languages without any volunteers may be supported.
There are many languages I would want to add here. Sámi, Meänkieli, Estonian.
Particularly niche languages. There are so many languages with several thousand Wikipedia articles and yet despite that no real news sites operate in the languages. Many African languages for example will struggle to find people to create the necessary materials for support, yet material exists on TikTok for example and Wikipedia. Why deprive ourselves of these languages to avoid flooding?
With an alpha feature that people could toggle on or off. The flooding issue will disappear. Users won’t be left waiting which honestly is a bizarre status quo. How many users did not spend years on these forums waiting for Hindi, Thai or Irish? Why repeat this with Amharic? Zulu? There are many opportunities here and the users who will feel ‘frustrated’ can put these languages out of sight and thus out of mind. Meanwhile lingQ may still focus on core languages. Some might complain about scripts, but honestly there are not that many relevant scripts in the world for languages with digital dictionaries. Neither adding dictionaries nor script support are challenging or time consuming enough to justify not doing this in my opinion.
I’ve often wondered what impact an additional language has on LingQ. Let’s say they add Hopi, and 100 users sign up for Hopi. What are the associated costs of that new language? Does it pay for itself or are users of major languages such as Spanish and Mandarin in effect subsidising minority languages? Is my estimate of 100 paying users in the right ball park for a niche language?
As an aside, the light blue background with images is dreadful, it’s really hard to read messages in this forum. Or is that just me?
I doubt there are many costs associated, every dictionary entry in LingQ gets shared, so that is one cost. However imports are probably the largest cost for LingQ to sustain, this cost is constant no matter language. Supporting a script, access to dictionaries are menial and probably one time expenses. Since LingQ supports saving user data for 3€ a month, we can surmise that most users probably pay for themselves several times over.
I think you make too many assumptions. There are costs associated with each language beyond the dictionary, sorting out bugs for example, and testing that each language works when major UI upgrades are implemented. But it’s not just monetary costs, they have a small team, and if they are diverted to look at a critical issue with Hopi, they can no longer work in other areas. I’m not saying you’re wrong, you might be right, we just don’t know.
I suspect LingQ don’t know the answer either. I tend to think that LingQ is driven more by passion than ruthless business acumen.
Sorry about the background. I was playing around with that feature in this forum and didn’t see what it did because it needed a refresh. All fixed now.
As for adding other languages, @LeifGoodwin is correct, the costs add up over time and nothing is that simple. New users expect languages we offer to work properly alpha or otherwise and the major languages subsidize all minor languages we add. We do this for the community only and it is definitely true that fixing issues that arise in minor languages takes resources away from everything else we could be doing.
So, this is very unlikely to happen.
I understand that, I think the best possible compromise would be that alpha languages are as I alluded to something you have to sign up for with the explicit agreement that you cannot ask for support in that language or that any bugs would be heavily delayed when your own work load would be low. I understand however that a lot of users probably would ignore those preconditions. Another possible caveat could be that any alpha language would be up to executive decision. Let’s take Hopi as an example. The likelihood of a new customer base appearing to learn Hopi will most likely be nil, so you could flat out reject it for alpha status. However a more relevant language such as any of the Baltic ones? Bengali? Somali? even Sámi? Here the customer base is much larger. So a cost benefit analysis could be performed or a requirement be made that an interest list be made for potential languages where users and potential users could sign up saying they would like to learn the language here (side note, just as the amount of votes for requests are limited, you could give a limited sets of lifetime votes per account who would vote on these languages, I suggest 3). That way the potential loss could be alleviated or avoided. Those are just my thoughts, I really get the feeling though that these underserved languages have so little support already from your competitors that a lot of users would accept a buggy experience with little to no support. But I realize that this could quickly open a pandora’s box. Hopefully, time will bring those languages here either way.