In order to become a supported language it needs 2 hours of beginners-, 5 hours of intermediate- and 5 as well for advanced material. Czech has at least the following amount of material.
138 minutes of beginner material (2 hours and 18 minutes)
369 minutes of intermediate material (6 hours and 9 minutes)
706 minutes of advanced material (11 hours and 46 minutes)
Arabic has also meet this millstone
120 minutes of beginner material (2 hours)
850 minutes of intermediate material (14 hours and 10 minutes)
531 minutes of advanced material (8 hours and 31 minutes)
Esperanto too, as was pointed out by Ress earlier.
What does actually change when a language is promoted to being supported?
I am not really sure, I remember that I read somewhere that all of the lingq beginner courses lessons are added to the library with translations to English or something like that. For example I think Czech or Arabic only had 6 of the who is she series. Then there is all the costumes for the avatar thing.
I also noticed on Friday that Ress had pointed out about Esperanto reaching this millstone. So since I have been suffering of a bit of insomnia I decided that I would spend a few hours on counting the amount of material in the Beta languages. I doubt that it changes things that much.
Also someone has done a huge job of importing advanced material for Czech there were two Jules Verne novels and quite many other courses with lessons that are somewhere between 15 minutes to 25 minutes. I only counted until I reached the amount needed to become a supported languages.
I wasn’t sure of what the requirements were really until I read this post (or saw it passing somewhere else). However, and I know there is a finite amount of resources (esp. time), you would think Arabic would be right up there with languages to study–especially compared to some of the other ones already up there (eg Swedish, Dutch, Greek, and Polish).
I suspect that it’s mostly Steve who imported so much stuff in Romanian, Czech and Ukrainian
Even in Russian. Seems to me many of the large courses date back to when he was studying that language full time.
Yea, but arabic doesn’t work properly on lingq: currently the new lingq displays the arabic words backwards and can’t adjust to proper Arabic (right to left) unless you use classic mode which is annoying. Also, they need to get a new Who is she put up with all 26 parts and good audio. They really should do this Arabic resources are hard to come by.
Yea, you would think so but the Arabic is deceptively not a single language. Imagine if all the Romance languages were considered one language… except none of them were written down and all the romance language countries used the ancient Latin as their official writing system. That is basically what you have with Arabic.
Jules Verne and most of the other advanced materials in Czech were read by a robot 
It’s problem. That can’t be good for the site’s reputation. Can we get a human to check it?
Yeah, speaking of checking content and the reputation of the site I have seen some quite serious errors on some of the Finnish and Swedish lessons. I posted it on support forum but no one from the Lingq team has answered.
For some reason I read “made” instead of “read”. But I take it the translations were done by hand.
The translation seems to be fine but it needs a human voice.
Unfortunately much of the Czech material uses text to speech for the audio. We would have to remove that if we made Czech a supported language. Also much of the material is from one source, and therefore only one voice. This can get a little tiring. I would not be comfortable in making Czech a supported language without a greater variety of human voices in our library.
I can’t judge 'Arabic, but given the problems with the writing system, I think Arabic should wait until we have time to deal with this issue.
The issue is not the number of speakers in the world but the quality of content we can provide.
LingQ needs to be more attentive to any problems with content, or issues related to learning that language, including dictionaries etc Of course we need the flags and costumes and cultural icons etc. as well. There could be other things as well. I don’t know.
I am responsible for much of the Romanian and Ukrainian not the Czech.
I just saw this. I was away and we don’t have native speakers of these languages here in our office. I answered you original comment as follows.
I am sorry to take so long to see this. Would it be possible to give you the “editor pencil” and ask you to make the corrections, since you are confident of what the correct version should be. The other option is to contact the provider.