So, I have already been shamelessly taking advantage of the ‘get 60 mini-stories translated and recorded and we’ll get the language supported’ offer by trying to cajole my friends into helping with Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hindi, but, at the risk of giving poor Zoran a heart attack, here’s my proposal to the userbase:
Even if the LingQ staff understandably do not want to pay for translators for languages that are unlikely to get enough new subscribers to be worth the expense, if enough of us are willing to contribute to pay one or more translators for an obscure language that we might be interested in, and where it looks unlikely that anyone who speaks it would be willing to do it in exchange for free subscriptions, it hopefully wouldn’t be that expensive for any one of us to contribute a share of those costs.
(Site admins, if this is not okay, please let me know and I’ll delete the post).
I would potentially be willing to chip in for translators for:
Punjabi*
Breton
Mongolian
Sakha (Yakut)
Scots Gaelic
Tuvan
Georgian
at least one Dravidian language - not sure which one because I don’t know which parts of South India I’ll want to visit - leaning towards Kannada*
…and, what the heck, maybe also Klingon (despite Steve Kaufmann’s vehement lack of interest, according to the online hangouts).
(I don’t promise to learn all of these in my lifetime, but I’m more likely to if they’re on LingQ)
Also, Finnish, which is on the site already - but it would still be useful to have the mini-stories, both in standard literary Finnish and in one of the more common spoken dialects.
Anyone else potentially interested in any of these, or want to make a sub-thread for other obscure languages?
[*Edit - yes, I am aware of the weirdness of calling these languages with many millions of speakers ‘obscure’, but hey, it’s not my fault that you can’t find much teaching material for them]