I was wondering if it has ever been considered to support ‘any’ language. For example, if I had some resources on some obscure language, I could add them under the appropriate language code and use it just like for any other language. Obviously each language would require a list of links to available dictionaries, rules for splitting words (which would be the same for most languages), etc., but that could also be controlled by the community too, wiki-style. Even if it were separate from the main site since the quality wouldn’t be expected to be any where near as good as the official languages. Sort of ‘unofficial, unsupported languages’.
It just seems to me that with such as awesome framework for language learning, it would be great if it could be expanded to allow working with any language. I know it’s already sort of possible as mentioned in the latest live webinar (use a language you aren’t planning on studying and upload your own resources and search dictionaries in your target language), but that is kind of awkward.
Personally, I would love this feature, because there are a few lesser known languages I’m interested in studying, and this platform has been one of the best I’ve tried so far for keeping track of known/learning words.
Just a thought. Interested to hear your responses. Thanks.
Agreed. A couple of languages I’m interested in are certainly unlikely to be showing up soon, if ever. And I’d rather not have to intentionally mislabel them.
There are other platforms available where you can do this. I don’t see why LingQ would want to bother putting that stuff in place under the LingQ brand. It’s pointless.
Um… the question really is, why wouldn’t they want to include this. Yes there are other platforms, but I’m going to use another similar platform for a different language, why should I bother using Lingq in the first place? For example, there is Learning with Texts ( http://lwt.sourceforge.net/ ) that supports custom languages, and if I decided to start using that for another language I would probably drop lingq altogether and learn all my languages on there.
It would be a shame to have an amazing platform such as Lingq and not be able to use it for other languages.
B/c it’s conceivably something not technically difficult, and there’s at least some level of demand for it. Obviously people probably wouldn’t sign up b/c such a feature is available, but those that have might stay longer.
Yea I agree. I think these languages could go under a different area that states there is no (or little content) available for them. I’d love to be able to study Armenian and Georgian using Lingq. To me it is the best resource out there.
We are rather going to spend time on improving current beta languages and make them fully supported as well as adding more languages to beta. We hope to add one new language per month which means that hopefully we will have lot more languages available at LingQ soon.
Best you can do for now is to use an existing slot to study an unsupported language to help track your vocabulary and learning progress, I am not sure why you think that is awkward?
Just use a slot of a language which you do not have plan to study in future, import lessons in a language you want to study (just make sure to keep these lessons private), and you can learn and track your progress with LingQ tools as for any fully supported language. The only “problem” is that you will need to use a dictionary in another window/tab, but otherwise it should work just fine.
But that’s exactly why it’s awkward - it’s under another language, and lingqs created are going to be ‘wrong’ according to the language (I’m also assuming that when you create a lingq it gets added to the suggested translations that all users see?), and it’s not possible to share lessons or use lessons others have shared in the custom language. I know it would technically work fine, which is one of the reasons why I was wondering if it has been considered to add official support for custom languages.
I am Georgian, my first language of course is Georgian. I am studying English now with lingQ, and I love it already, but I have a problem with it. Sometimes I make translation of words in Georgian and save them in lingqs. As there is no Georgian language to select I am choosing “other”, but I don’t like it really. I’d like very much to be able to select Georgian language from the list.
I understand that for people who are studying Georgian and not “from it” there may be different perspective, but for me it is very important. Georgian is beautiful language with unique alphabet.
Is there any way I could help to add Georgian to lingQ’s language selection?
I guess it is still possible to translate the mini-stories into Georgian to have the language be added.
I am on the way of adding Belarusian which hopefully could be added in December.
Write an e-mail to Zoran (zoran at lingq dot com) to request a portion of stories to be translated. He should reply with an explanation of your next steps.
