New Mini-Stories Courses

Content Forum
81

Hi Zoran.
I just discovered that there are no 31-40 stories for Brazilian Portuguese. Any chance to get them anytime soon?

82

French stories 46-60 are now up.

83

@serge_shadrin Yeah, we should definitely complete those too. I’ll find someone to finish them. Thanks for the reminder!

84

albanian

85

Why is there only 1 new Dutch mini-story added (lesson 21)? Three weeks ago, a message was posted that all the Dutch mini-stories were completed and would be posted two weeks ago.

86

I had to do audio optimization so it took longer than expected. Started loading them now, all 60 will be up within a day or two.

87

Great.
Thanks Zoran.

88

For what it’s worth, I just bought a copy of Waves Audio’s Z Noise plugin, for removing background hum and noise from audio recordings. If there are any audio recordings which have particularly bad background noise (as long as it is more-or-less continuous, like electronic hum, fan noise etc, as opposed to intermittent like traffic or other people talking in the background), I could have a go at running them through that.

Or if you are interested, they have it on sale at the moment for $29 with the coupon code so that you can run it yourself if you’re doing lots of these:

89

@Zoran When will the last 30 Hungarian mini-stories be uploaded?

90

Have y’all ever paid anyone to do the mini stories or is it all volunteer-based? If it’s the former I think y’all should get someone to do Hindi, because it’s the language with the most speakers that you don’t have.

91

How is Norwegian coming? Have you found a volunteer yet? At what point would you consider hiring someone to do Norwegian mini-stories? I have been asking this for over a year. Thanks.

92

@DocT All 60 Hungarian stories are up now.

93

I hope Lithuanian will be added soon!

94

Hello,

Could someone add Icelandic to the growing list of languages provided by LingQ?
Kind regards,
B

95

Has anyone volunteered to do Klingon yet?

96

No, nothing in that language so far.

97

That’d be awesome! We are working on Latvian now. Got about half of them done

98

We have been slowly chipping away at the Latvian mini stories. We’ve translated the first 30 now. Should we send them in?

99

I was looking into this a while ago - a fellow LingQ user was going to try asking on the Facebook forum, and I put up a request on Reddit, and in response, Reddit user ‘Kahless’ actually put up a Klingon translation of the first mini story - but explained that many of the words in the story were things that he had to backform himself, since they did not yet officially exist in Klingon. I’m sure you’re probably aware, since you are asking the question, but for anyone else reading this, the Klingonist community is very concerned about canonicity - only Mark Okrand may produce new official Klingon vocabulary (not a rule that Okrand himself ever came up with or insisted on, but one which the community has decided to uphold, presumably on the basis that that means that there is an unambiguous shared pool of vocabulary that all Klingonists can find without too much difficulty), and the language is far from complete, since creating the Klingon language is only an occasional project for Okrand, so unless and until the missing words from the mini stories can be brought into existence by the creator of the language, it would be impossible to create a translation that the Klingonist community would consider valid.

Possible solutions: 1) identify all the words in the Mini Stories that do not yet have Klingon translations, and persuade Mark Okrand to create translations of all of those words (conceivable - he does sometimes oblige the enthusiasts by bringing along lists of translations of most-requested words when he goes to the qepHom or qep’a’ meet-ups), and then get someone to translate the stories using those words;

  1. Get someone who already speaks Klingon to produce a set of 60 stories in the same sort of style as the mini stories, but only using vocabulary that already exists in Klingon, and persuade the LingQ staff to add Klingon as a supported language on the basis of that. Probability - I expect that adding a niche conlang would be very low on LingQ’s priority list, but if they were willing to agree in principle, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to persuade existing Klingon speakers to create the materials. I noticed that DuoLingo’s Klingon course is about twice the size of their newly-added Finnish course, which may by a good indicator of the level of dedication one could expect people to put into the project of expanding the opportunities to learn it, but on the other hand, there is not yet a good machine translation tool for Klingon. LingQ will presumably not want to go to the effort of creating a whole Google Translate style module, although I believe that the boQwI’ app will parse down individual words, so it may be that you could effectively have an on-board dictionary but not an onboard autotranslate for phrases of more than one word. But on the other other hand, Klingon grammar, though consciously designed to be as unlike any Earthly languages as possible, is nonetheless extremely regular, so possibly the task of creating a machine translation tool would not be that hard, it’s just that no one has yet done it.
100

probably going to turn out to be an unpopular opinion but I think it detracts from lingqs status and credibility somewhat. Learning a few whimsical phrases on duolingo can be fun but lingq is all about fluency and although there are many beta languages with minimal content provided by lingq the content is out there on the web and the assumed anticipation is that all these will eventually get filled no matter how long it takes. How much realistically is there in klingon? what news feeds can you use? lingq is not a vehicle for ministories in hundreds of languages but meant to be a really effective and serious tool.