Some while ago Steve had us voting via facebook on what new languages we would like to see added on lingQ.
I don’t know if this was done a second time or if lingQ is not announcing another vote because they’re busy enough as it is and need time before thinking about new language adds. My question is, are you about to repeat a voting?
In case you are, I think it would be nice to have something like a fixed voting form here on lingQ. Users could throw in one vote per language to see where there’s demand and so “democratically” vote in the languages most users want to have properly represented.
In any case, thank you Steve and the LingQ team! And I hope this post is in the right place…
Unfortunately, even the top languages are far from reaching the threshold because hardly anyone cares about this. I asked a lot of people to vote, and gathered most of the overall votes, but I don’t see almost any interest from other people… The usual reaction is a disappointed and pessimistic one, like “no language will ever get to 1,000 votes”.
Anyone who reads this and is on Facebook, please go and support me by voting for the European languages (esp. Romanian)!
And no, Tommy, many people before you asked to be able to vote here but this suggestion was always rejected.
Yes, I also feel it will be hard to reach. I feel that if lingq could also offer help to people learning “less popular” languages, like Urdu etc, that is what would make this place really special - offering something very unique and different from the other sites who only offer to teach languages like French, Spanish, English, German and the like:)
They did add one language each month from July 2011 to February this year, but they stopped because very few people actually study those languages.
If you want to study Urdu, start asking all your friends to vote for it on the Facebook poll.
The problem is that few people study these rarer languages. Setting them up , adding dictionaries, worrying about where content will come from, or worrying about the limited amount of content in our library etc. ends up being a distraction with little benefit for most members of our community. I think that we will get back to this subject. There are languages that we don’t have that I would like to study. But it is not in our immediate plans, unless there is a powerful interest in a particular language.
Elric, Turkish is already available on LingQ and that option should be removed from the poll. Nothing prevents you from voting for as many languages as you like. That’s why I wrote in an earlier post: “Anyone who reads this and is on Facebook, please go and support me by voting for the European languages (esp. Romanian)!”
Now, I think the solution of how to get your desired language on here is not to mobilize as much indifferent facebook friends as possible.
What we need is not 1000 votes and nothing to back them up, but native speakers who are going to produce content.
Rather you would have to go out, somehow find speakers of that language and simultaneously push lingQ on every front, in order to find those 1 out of how many be it native speakers, who is motivated and inspired enough to produce “Who is she?” etc. in their language.
Michele for example, who presumably wants to eventually speak with Romanians, would already try and find as many Romanian friends as possible by any means and win over for LingQ who he can. If then some of them are willing to help get their language more studied, Michele also already has his native friends.
Of course this isn’t quickly accomplished. You would have to keep your ears open as soon as the thought to start “collecting” natives until you’re ready to beginn learning the language.
The languages I was thinking about are Hindi, Hungarian and Catalan. Luckily three more languages of interest to me are already supported by lingQ and give me a good time window. So my suggested way of getting Hindi would be to already be aware of natives and seek them out online and offline, befriend them (not just to use them, but because you like the natives, right?) and so have the people who can point you to good resources and may even produce some. This should be possible for most living languages in all major cities.
That way lingQ doesn’t have to worry about paying someone to make the beginner stories and the lingQpodcast.
It never occurred to me that I could vote for more than one language. I thought we were supposed to vote for the next language (singular) to be added? I could easily vote for some 10-20 languages in that list, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to study them in the near future.
With the past rules, it made sense to vote only for the language you wanted to be the winner. Now, there is no competition among languages. I won’t study all those languages soon, either, but I would like to study them sooner or later. I have also voted for a few languages other people would like to be added, so I don’t see anything wrong in voting for more languages.
Tommy, what I have been doing these months is asking my Facebook friends to vote and contacting Romanians from Couchsurfing to tell them about LingQ and to ask them to vote on Facebook. That’s how I gathered at least 50-100 votes for Romanian. I will contact more people soon.
Good thought Mike. I guess when you have just a handful of natives to bring to the table, who will tutor, translate the beginner stories and produce a lingQpodcast, then the LingQ team probably won’t mind the effort to set the language up.
They won’t add Farsi just because you asked for it. You will need to follow the rules and find some 1,000 people who vote for it on Facebook.
I am contacting many Romanians and this is bringing some results:
Romanian is leading the poll with over 460 votes;
at least 10-20 Romanians joined LingQ. We should hope they will stay and will be able to tutor and provide content.
