Is there a chance to introduce DANISH as a Beta-language on LingQ?

I would like to study my target language DANISH also on LingQ! If there is any poll to vote for, I should add that I am not a Facebook-member, so I could not vote for Danish on Facebook.

GO FOR DANISH!

Are there Danish LingQ - members who could upload content in Danish on LingQ?

Fasulye

Thanks for this important info, hape! Steve, I am very unhappy now because I cannot take part in the voting procedure for new Beta-languages on LingQ because this is connected with a Facebook-membership.

QUOTE of hape:
“So you will need 938 friends who all have own Facebook accounts and vote for Danish … ;-)” END OF QUOTE

If the status quo looks like this, this is a deeply sad situation for me!!! Can there not be anything done to introduce a different voting place?

Fasulye

A general thought: if it’s highly unlikely that some languages will be added in the near future (due to votes/the voting system itself/technical difficulties/something else), I’d explore other methods.

And now my thoughts:

  1. At least I should have the right vote for the introduction of new languages on LingQ! I am now withought any right of voting!

  2. Despite my poverty I am not completely useless here on LingQ, because I am working together with two LingQ members producing language podcasts in German and Dutch. By the way, I don’t earn any points for that, because my collaborators write the transcripts.

  3. I don’t think that Scandinavian languages are completely unimportant!

Fasulye

Thanks to Jeff for this constructive suggestion!

Fasulye

If I could upload Danish texts for me privately (because they are copyrighted!), then I wouldn’t have the audios. What I need for language practise is: text plus audio!

Yes, it’s true that Norwegian and Danish use the same alphabet.

I don’t use the LingQ-dictionaries, so I wouldn’t mind of having to look up words in my “Gyldendal Dansk-Hollandsk” book.

Fasulye

I expect that in the future we will find a way to accomodate the wishes of the few people who want to learn languages that we do not offer. Right now we are focused on improving the user experience for the majority of users. Adding more languages is a distraction for us.

If you check the number of people studying Beta languages in the Friends area you will see that the activity is very limited. As an example, my Activity Index for Czech, where I am active is 3705, and for Russian where I am much less active is 776. I checked to see how many learners had an AI of over 700 (quite active) in any Beta language, and how many had an AI of over 100 (somewhat active). Here are the results. The first number is the over 700 group, and the second number is the group between 100 and 700.
Czech 1,8
Polish 0,1
Dutch 1,3
Latin 0,4
Norwegian 2,4
Esperanto 0,2
Turkish 0,3
Finnish 3,5
Hebrew 1, 1

So our first task is to make LingQ even more attractive to people, and to get the word out, so that we get more users. Adding more languages will have to come later, in my view.

It looks like I’m the only one who is actively campaigning for people to vote at that poll. So, it’s obvious that if most people don’t believe it’s possible to gather 1,000 votes and thus don’t do anything in that direction, no language will ever reach that threshold.

Also, Mike, that poll is not very transparent. I went on the facebook page today to check on it, and I couldn’t find it.

It looks like polls are not clearly displayed with FB’s new layout for Pages, but there are links to the poll in many places, included this page.

So far I didn’t know that Norwegian is a Beta-language on LingQ. And also Swedish is offered.

I had my reasons to choose Danish instead of Swedisch or Norwegian and I am already studying it for almost 3 years.

But I at least would have the right to vote for Danish, even it it’s not very likely that my vote will have a result.

Fasulye

As I am using Czech for Amharic, Latin for Greek and Norwegian for Danish, I do not think that the statistics give the total picture.

I also hope we can get Danish, because pronunciation of this language is not as easily learned as that of German, Spanish, Greek or Italian, for example.

At present I cannot access Facebook because it has been blocked by my service provider.

I do hope you can add some of the languages that some of us want, but I think I do see the problem. If not many people want to study the language, not many people will use the lessons that there are, and not many people will add new lessons, thus not many people will use LingQ for that language, so not many people will use the lessons… ad infinitum.