Beta languages, change in policy

Open Forum
21

HI Mikebond,

I had no idea that one should be a long-time member of this site to write own opinion. Are you running this site?

Pleas let me be clear that I did not try to offend you and still do not. I do not care whether you respect his decision or not and have no right to correct your behavior. My point was that Steve has explained why he and his team had to make the decision. I simply wanted the members of the LingQ to support it. Steve has a right and good reason to change the policy, and in fact, he did not do anything wrong.

Sure, Steve will listen to you and others who have difference idea, but please note as well that this is a commercial site and he owns it. I am just grateful that he has been sharing his way of learning languages and building this wonderful site.

If I misunderstand your remark, you can just ignore me.

22

Hi Imyirtseshem,

thank you for sharing your idea on modern Hebrew speakers could not communicate with Moses. yes, nobody can clearly say that it is possible. I just tried to say that it would be possible to talk with the ancient prophet, if he spoke the Hebrew as written in the Bible. It was my assumption as a Hebrew speaking person. :slight_smile:

23

Iā€™m very happy with this decision. Hebrew is my next language;

Off course I donā€™t know the language yet, but a fried of mine, a native Hebrew speaker, explained me that there are some differences but it isnā€™t like ancient and modern Greek. I think a native speaker today can read without problems the Old Testament in the original.

24

Which one does God speak, ancient or modern Hebrew?

25

@ayeka39: ā€œā€¦Sure, Steve will listen to you and others who have difference idea, but please note as well that this is a commercial site and he owns it.ā€

After youā€™ve been here for a little while, you will probably notice that Steve does not always listen to the opinions of othersā€¦

(Mike has been a member here for quite a long time, so I doubt whether he needs you to explain that this is a ā€œcommercial siteā€.)

26

skyblueteapot: God doesnā€™t use language, its too inefficient and time dependent for omnipotent beings. He communicates through guilty conscience manipulation raysā€¦

27

Anyway, now that we have Hebrew, who is going to be filling the Hebrew library with lessons? Iā€™d like to make a content suggestion that would help us not only learn languages but defend ourselves at the same time, some lessons on Krav Maga! :smiley:

28

I am a bit disappointed in the fact that we wonā€™t be having Cantonese added this month, but I am actually pleased with the addition of Hebrew. I earnestly think a large part of the problem when you guys add beta languages is that people on facebook voting, are not voting for languages they truly care about and are not TRUE language enthusiasts. Look at the past results: Esperanto, Latin, Norwegianā€¦three languages with virtually NO practical use. Norwegian does BUT, LINGQ already supports Swedish. Did you ever hear the joke ā€œA Swede, a Dane, and a Norwegian walk into a barā€¦and they all communicate just fineā€. Even in his book, Barry Farber stated that when he was young he couldnā€™t affording the Learn Swedish book but the bookstore owner told him any native Swedish speaker would understand Norwegian.

The point I am getting at is that these are not languages that true language learners want to use and the people voting on facebook are simply voting for languages because they seem ā€œcoolā€ yet have no practical application and facebook users may not intend to use them the same way the avid Lingqer would. I know I have barely looked at any of them because of just that fact. However, I am pleased with the addition of Hebrew.

I think the beta languages are truly a great addition and will only grow and material will expand in the future. But for now, until we have a bigger population base, I have some suggestions as to how we could better utilize the Beta language system

1.Perhaps the poll should reset EVERY month, instead of a long running poll like weā€™ve had. It makes it much more difficult for languages to get chosen this way, and the ambitious LingQ followers will keep up on it rather than just vote and forget about it.

2.LingQ staff should regulate which languages are being added so we are getting the most practical use of the languages. Example: if Farsi is added on month, donā€™t add Dari the next month; if Hindi is added one month, donā€™t add Urdu the next month; we have Serbian donā€™t add Croatian, we have Czech donā€™t add Slavic; If we have Swedish, donā€™t add Norwegian. I understand the differences in writing system, but for practicality purposes adding another languages intelligible with another already on just seems like a waste. If a person were serious about learning that language, they would have already been working on the intelligible one.

3.Furthermore, in terms of ā€œdead languagesā€, they honestly should not be added. There are no native Latin speakers, adding it on LingQ defies the purpose of trying to get native content. Nobody speaks Latin and you wonā€™t hear it anywhere. I have studied Latin, but of course only in its written form. Passively listening to Latin is redundant since there arenā€™t any Latin speakers or regular users.

4.Finally, judge the abundance of potential material. This is something that I have a hard time with since I am interested in a lot of languages with less than 2,000,000 speakers, but in actuality it is going to be hard to obtain material for more exotic languages. Say something like Navajo or even Hmong. Very interesting languages, but the abundance of material may not be there.

I just wanted to know what you guys thought about these suggestions. I am only throwing them out there because I initially loved the idea of Beta languages, but have been rather disappointed with the direction theyā€™ve been going. I hope in 2012 we can really get some more beta languages up and functioning and maybe even get them fully supported!

29

God speaks Arabic, the first language, of which all others are bastardized versions of.

30

Michele: Thanks. Thatā€™s what I wanted to know. It doesnā€™t sound very hopeful for Greek, of either stripe, does it? Do you know, did the voting usually go up to 1,000 in a month, or is that just a sop to hoi polloi, making it appear at first blush that there is a chance to add beta languages, but providing a nearly impossible condition to do so?

ayeka39: I think most all of us who were pushing for Greek are pleased by the addition of Hebrew. I know that I am, and others, such as Michele and Imyirtseshem, have said that they are, as well.

What has not pleased many of us is the sudden change of the process. Now Greek, which lost by just a few votes that were obviously available, looks very unlikely to be added to the site, ever. We are disappointed, and the sudden change in process is quite disappointing, to say the least.

31

Cantonese, which was the actual winner, had got 242 votes. Only Latin had got more, I think. Anyway, I will continue campaigning for all the European languages. I want to prove that it is possible to reach 1000 votes.

32

@Ernie: ā€œā€¦I think most all of us who were pushing for Greek are pleased by the addition of Hebrew. I know that I am, and others, such as Michele and Imyirtseshem, have said that they are, as well.ā€

Agreed. I have mentioned several times that Hebrew is a language I would very much like to learn sometime. The comments about Greek have absolutely nothing to do with Hebrew, actually.

33

I think the votes should be reset every month so we know the people really passionate about wanting to learn a language are the ones voting. I am sure tons of people votes once and never checked the poll ever again.

34

Good idea Steve about focusing on the major languages.

I wonder how useful this adding of small obscure languages really is. Sure, there is the odd guy out that studies them, but is that worth the trouble?

I had a look at the number of learners for the beta languages and if the cut off point is 500 activity points which would be roughly 10 hours a month, as I would imagine, then we have 13 learners for all 9 beta languages combined.

In fact Czech, Polish and Dutch were the first to be added and remain the only ones in this scenario to have multiple serious learners.

Every other beta languages added since then has one serious learnerā€¦

Sure there are a bunch of other people who have looked at those languages as their activity scores indicates, they are spending somewhere between 2 and 9 hours of learning a month and if weā€™re counting those people in as serious then thatā€™s another 29 people.

But most of these people are studying other languages primarily and have just merely tapped into the beta languages as theyā€™ve become available.

Even counting these people, 42 people for 9 languages isnā€™t a lot considering the bulk (29) would fall into the casual learner category and even with them a little more than 3 people studying a language on average canā€™t be considered a huge succes.

Now the demand for a language is 1000 votes when the number of actually serious learners for all beta languages combined is only 42?

It seems to me a lot of people have voted for languages that they will never actually start learning at lingq.

Sure if you ask me in a poll whether it would be cute have Hungarian at lingq, I would say sure it would be cute and I would vote yes.

Iā€™d even vote for Hungarian over Latvian, but that doesnā€™t mean Iā€™m going to actually learn the language at lingq.

But then again Iā€™m not familiar with the amount of time/effort/cost that goes into adding these beta languages, if the cost is minimal then by all means continue.

However, if it does turn out be a choice between expanding the material for the existing popular languages or expanding towards more and more small languages 1 or 2 people might want to check out, I would prefer lingq to focus on improving its core product (the officially supported languages and their libraries).

So if youā€™re going to do that, that would be great.

35

I understand for certain languages where the script causes issues, but why would it not be possible to add every language with a Roman (or supported) alphabet as a beta language and just see what happens to them? Iā€™m not going to presume to know how the system was coded but I would think that it would just be a few lines of configuration to set up another Beta language for Language X and if it takes off great, if not, just let them sit there. I do think though that adding Urdu would make some good economic sense as Iā€™m sure there is a large untapped Indian language learning market, and the ability to contribute content in their native language would probably be a large pull for potential Indian new members.

Also, this could be a separate thread question, but how does a Beta language graduate to a full fledged language?

36

In theory everything is easy, but in practice it rarely is.

With regard to the traditional splitter, we did, as Hape suggested, look at converting the traditional to simplified for the purpose of splitting. We then had to deal with the issue of how the characters would display in the LingQ widget. The splitter relies on a dictionary and our dictionary is based on simplified characters. We tried a Traditional character dictionary and it did not work, and so we found another source and in the end, things just got more and more complicated, not to mention the fact that Cantonese has some characters that do not exist in Mandarin. We decided that if we cannot do it simply and properly, we were better to back off. I am disappointed since I wanted to work on my Cantonese.

It is not ā€˜no workā€™ to add languages, and to deal with requests for dictionaries, and other issues. In fact it is a distraction at various levels, one which gives little benefit to LingQ and most of LingQā€™s members. It is also not a good thing when someone expects to study a language at LIngQ and finds that there is little content.

I have benefited greatly from having Czech at LingQ and do not regret that we started Beta languages, but it is now time to take a step back and focus on other areas that are more important. I hope that we do get 1,000 votes for a new language, or in the future when we have solved other more pressing issues, we can focus on adding more languages. I would like to learn Farsi, and even Cree one day, as well as a few others.

37

Steve, I really wish you guys wouldnā€™t give up on the beta system just yet. I earnestly believe part of the reason these languages have failed is due to the lack of content and interest. Latina dn Esperanto have no native speakers and are virtually useless in terms of practical use. As far as Norwegian, it is the same as Swedish. You have proven that if content is availalbe the system is great. We just need to either 1)Allow the selection of new beta languages based on a poll where people vote on the language content they can submiy or 2)narow it down to three or four languages and have people vote. The poll has been open for six months and no one language received 1,000 votes, so I higlhy doubt it will happen. I think a change in voting regulations and more involvement in decision from the LingQ staff will allow such a system to thrive.

38

ā€œIā€™d love to see a place where content providers could gather and discuss their plans and work together.ā€

Good idea, even if right now Iā€™m not in the right mood to feel like creating any new content.

39

Content is definitely king, and in the case of Latin, there is lots of free content floating around on the Internet. The problems is that pretty much none of it has any audio available, which should not surprise anybody.

It may seem really straightforward to provide that audio but it isnā€™t. I started recording myself reading a couple of chapters of Augustineā€™s Confessions but it ended up taking too much time as I had to rehearse the text and record parts of it many times making sure the pronunciation and intonation were acceptable. Besides, thereā€™s absolutely no guarantee that my rendition of that text is accurate at all as Iā€™m not an expert Latinist but only a student of the language.

As far as I know, only content with audio can be shared here at LingQ and thatā€™s very unfortunate for Latin. The same would be the case for Ancient Greek.

40

Rank wrote:
ā€œ(If itā€™s not going to be added at LingQ, then maybe LWT is something to be explored after all?)ā€

Yes, why not give it a try. Iā€™m told itā€™s fairly easy to set up a new language, add a dictionary, import own texts etc (havenā€™t yet had the time to explore it myself, though).

The day LingQ has a slot for language X, one can possibly import the vocabulary here.