I have been waiting for this for years. I hear that Lingq is a great resource; but I can’t use it because I study South Asian languages. In particular, I study Tamil, Hindi, and Sinhala. India will be the most populated country in the world as of 2023. There is literally no excuse for Lingq to not offer South Asian languages. What is the hold up? Is the problem the difference between written and spoken? The scripts? Do you not know enough people to add these? We talking about one of the world’s most populated areas. Saying there is not enough interest is simply not true.
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Lingq needs the mini stories and a grammar guide in hindi before they proceed. They don’t do it themselves but require the members (us) to send the content to them.
I guess they haven’t received this minimum content yet so they can’t/won’t proceed.
“There is literally no excuse for Lingq to not offer South Asian languages. What is the hold up? Is the problem the difference between written and spoken? The scripts? Do you not know enough people to add these? We talking about one of the world’s most populated areas. Saying there is not enough interest is simply not true.”
Gujarati is a language on LingQ, if you’re interested.
The issue with new languages is money. They allocate their money to select projects, which they believe will give a good return on investment. They have certain criteria of an amount of content needed before releasing a language. This includes a translation and recording of the Mini Stories, a grammar guide, and some other content. Because they aren’t allocating money to this, they rely on volunteers. For instance, @rokkvi did this for his mother tongue of Icelandic and that’s why Icelandic is now a language at LingQ.
There seems to be quite a few of you guys, who would like to study Hindi. Perhaps you guys might consider crowdsourcing. If you all contribute 10 or 20 USD/euros each, you may have enough money to pay for a Hindi tutor to edit Google Translated versions of the Mini Stories and record the audios.
Alternatively, wait for a few years and hope that one of these languages is what Steve wants to study after he’s finished with Arabic and Persian.
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Thanks!
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Yes but why does lingq tie itself to the mini stories rule? This question has been asked many times without an explanation. Hindi is such a major world language compared with some of the minor languages to be found on Lingq, it does not make sense not to have it available. Also we are already paying for Lingq so why expect us to pay more again. It appears as if Lingq is just sitting back and waiting for customers to do the work.
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The explanation is simple.
If a language is offered without content, there’ll most certainly be individuals complaining about the lack of content. Whilst the eager ones will get busy importing content for their own use - content they cannot share publicly on LingQ due to copyright issues - others will be wondering why offer a new language without any content whatsoever. Certain users do not wish to spend time troubleshooting the inevitable reoccurring bugs LingQ suffers from when importing material.
If users import material they’ve created themselves and there’s missing audio, missing text, mismatch of audio and text, inaudible audio or a whole host of other problems - existing users will rightly complain.
By requiring certain material such as a grammar guide, mini stories etc there’s presumably a higher chance the material won’t be riddled with mistakes. It’s human to err though when a language site persistently exhibits language errors the mind boggles.
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I’d like to see Irish and I have little use for mini-stories etc. A content-free set of languages could be offered and clearly labelled as such. This would be useful to those who know a little of the language already and can use LingQ to read their own scripts.
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It would be good, if they add Tamil language.
bbbblinq, you may have little use mini-stories because you may be an independent learner. I think you’ll find that learners on LingQ are a mixed bag of independent and dependent learners.
For less independent learners languages without content would be a disaster. To be honest, people complain enough about LingQ now anyway - it’s an imperfect system - why have even more people complain simply because not all learners are independent learners?
I agreed.
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I agree!! I would love to see Thai, Khmer, etc. I love Southeast Asia and would love more representation on this area!!
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In LingQ’s defence, LingQ does not offer Asian languages because many new learners wouldn’t know how to find material if the language contained no content for them. It was just there and they had to get on with it themselves!
LingQ requires mini stories in an attempt to standardise the LingQ experience. Unfortunately, LingQ is not willing to pay for the content and relies on users producing high quality content for free. Hence the years and years of delay. The huge majority of material on LingQ has been created for free by users - who earn points which can be converted to money for their content based on unique user clicks - but LingQ has become very silent about this recently and expects content to be produced by users for free. As rokkvi says (see post Who Here Is Learning Icelandic? - Language Forum @ LingQ)
“I think it is crucial for new learners, who are not super-learners, polyglots or experienced LingQ users that the Library should be vast and interesting. They are not necessarily going to figure out to just import material or know where to find it, plus it is very difficult to find any beginner level texts to import in the first place.”
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It is also evident that only a handful of people actually study the new languages like Tagalog, Icelandic or Armenian. Some users were really keen on having Tagalog added to LingQ but once it was available only a few users actually started learning and not just dabbling into Tagalog according to the statistics.
It is always nice to have more languages to study but the value for LingQ is limited. They “compete” with apps like Babbel, Busuu or whatever other language learning app. With their streamlined programs and appealing design, they attract a lot of users and definitely don’t care about adding any rare language.
For me it is absolutely ok that LingQ leaves this to its users and it is actually a nice service that they offer adding new languages to relatively low conditions.
As a suggestion I support that LingQ creates an incubator like the one Duolingo once had.
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Just so you know, it appears that the Duolingo incubator has been discontinued. Apparently due to their IPO initiative in 2021. Now in 2023 you are simply redirected.
Yes I know. This is why I said “once had”. Duolingo also closed its forum and so sort of made some steps away from its user base.