#duolingo incubator | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yet-another-bookmark-lost · 7 years

Text

Duolingo

One of the things that make me wonder on Duolingo is how the relatively small languages like Welsh or Czech could find contributors and be made, while the quite big languages like Hindi and Arabic or the popular ones like Japanese or Korean are either only getting started and are in phase one or are not made at all.

By this i mean learning your target language from English. I have seen French from Arabic and many other languages from Arabic. Where there is a demand and means to satisfy it soon there will be a way to do it, which could explain the numerous “from Arabic” and “to English” courses . But what about the flip side? Where are the to Arabic or to Chinese courses? I know that Arabic has many versions and how you speak and write it depends heavily on where you live but doing them with the description like Egyptian Arabic or Moroccan Arabic would solve at least some problems ? The same thing goes with Chinese - do Mandarin and Cantonese with the description of where the version that you are learning would be considered to be the one used on daily basis.

Another thing i found that theoretically could put a damper on getting the course even to phase one is that they wouldn’t be interesting to the general audience. I say theoretically because there already are courses that in some aspects could be considered to be less beneficial to the learner like exemplary Esperanto ( aside from the fact that it could serve as a foundation for learning vocabulary of romance languages ).

I do not believe that widely understood Chinese , Arabic or Hindi wouldn’t gather people’s attention. These languages have everything that would make them attractive to people. They are used by a enormous amount of people around the world, being fluent in any degree in them is an advantage when it comes to finding a job, all of them have a hundreds if not thousands years of culture behind them and people generally see them as interesting languages.

I will admit that i do not know a lot about the whole procedure of getting the course taken under consideration and accepted or how are the creators of the course checked for their fluency in language. In fact I know close to nothing in this regard. This post was just a reflection on a topic that i find interesting. Feel free to continue the topic. I don't know whether or not i have offended anyone with it but if I did then i apologize, I didn't mean to attack you or make you upset.

#this post will not likely gather any attention at all but better be safe than sorry thus the apology #at the end #also i am sorry for my grammar i am not a native speaker and i am still learning it in school #even if my textbook says that right now i should be at the level of b2 which i find to be flattering but still unlikely #duolingo #arabic #chinese #hindi #duolingo incubator #duolingo courses #a reflection on duolingo #i thing thats what this form of writing is called #a vague thought about a topic without any clearly stated problem and solution #i am not in advanced first language class in which you learn other forms of writing that just an problem essay or interpretation of a poem #so i am not the best at it #and nobody checks it for me so my errors are out there waiting to be either pointed out by someone or left alone for eternity #and are perpetuated by me #some of them at least #language learning #language apps

1 note · View note

loveletter2you · 3 years

Text

general language learning resources

dictionaries:

wordreference - has spanish, french, italian, portuguese, catalan, german, swedish, dutch, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese, korean, & arabic

reverso translation - has arabic, chinese, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish

bab.la - has spanish, arabic, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, swedish, swahili, thai, turkish, vietnamese, & esperanto

digital dictionaries of south asia - has dictionaries for assamese, baluchi, bengali, divehi, hindi, kashmiri, khowar, lushai, malayalam, marathi, nepali, oriya, pali, panjabi, pashto, persian, prakrit, rajasthani, sanskrit, sindhi, sinhala, tamil, telugu & urdu

resources for learning words in context:

reverso context - has arabic, chinese (in beta), dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish (in beta)

linguee - has german, spanish, portuguese, french, italian, russian, japanese, chinese, polish, dutch, swedish, danish, finnish, greek, czech, romanian, hungarian, slovak, bulgarian, slovene, lithuanian, latvian, maltese, & estonian

for learning different writing systems

omniglot - an encyclopedia with literally any language you could think of including ancient languages

scripts - an app for learning other writing systems with a limited amount for free (you can do 5 minutes a day for free) - has the ASL alphabet, Russian cyrillic, devanagari, Japanese kana, Chinese hanzi, & Korean hangul

Wikipedia is also helpful for learning different writing systems honestly!

pronunciation

forvo - a pronunciation dictionary with MANY languages (literally an underrated resource i use it all the time)

a really helpful video by luca lampariello with tips on how to get better pronunciation in any language

ipachart.com - an interactive chart with almost every sound!! literally such an amazing resource for learning the IPA (however does not include tones)

another interactive IPA chart (this one does have tones)

language tutoring

italki - there’s many websites for language tutoring but i think italki has the most languages (i have a referral link & if you use it we can both get $10 toward tutoring lol) - they say they support 130 languages!

there’s also preply and verbling which are also good but there aren’t as many options for languages - preply has 27 and verbling has 43

(obviously these are not free but if you have the money i think tutoring is a great way to learn a language!)

getting corrections/input from native speakers

hellotalk - an app for language exchanges with native speakers & they also have functions where you can put up a piece of writing and ask for corrections - honestly this app is great

tandem - language exchange app but unlike hellotalk you can choose multiple languages (although i think hellotalk is a little bit better)

LangCorrect - supports 170 languages!

HiNative - supports 113 languages!

Lang-8 - supports 90 languages!

verb conjugation

verbix - supports a ton of languages

Reverso conjugation - only has english, french, spanish, german, italian, portuguese, hebrew russian, arabic, & japanese

apps

duolingo - obviously everybody knows about duolingo but i’m still going to put it here - i will say i think duolingo is a lot more useful for languages that use the latin alphabet than languages with another writing system however they do have a lot of languages and add more all the time - currently they have 19 languages but you can see what languages they’re going to add on the incubator

memrise - great for vocab! personally i prefer the app to the desktop website

drops - you can only do 5 minutes a day for free but i still recommend it because it’s fun and has 42 languages!

LingoDeer - specifically geared towards asian languages - includes korean, japanese, chinese & vietnamese (as well as spanish, french, german, portuguese and russian), however only a limited amount is available for free

busuu - has arabic, chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, spanish, russian, spanish, & turkish,

Mondly - has 33 languages including spanish, french, german, italian, russian, japanese, korean, chinese, turkish, arabic, persian, hebrew, portuguese (both brazilian & european), catalan, latin, dutch, swedish, norwegian, danish, finnish, latvian, lithuanian, greek, romanian, afrikaans, croatian, polish, bulgarian, czech, slovak, hungarian, ukrainian, vietnamese, hindi, bengali, urdu, indonesian, tagalog & thai

misc

a video by the polyglot Lýdia Machová about how different polyglots learn languages - this video is great especially if you don’t know where to start in terms of self study

LangFocus - a youtube channel of this guy who talks about different languages which is always a good place to start to understand how a specific language works also his videos are fun

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb - this book is great and available online completely for free!

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (on pdfdrive) - another great book about language learning

Anki - a flashcard app (free on desktop for any system & free on android mobile - not free on ios mobile) that specifically uses spaced repetition to help you learn vocabulary, it’s got a slightly ugly design but it’s beloved by many language learners & is honestly so helpful

YouTube - literally utilize youtube it is so good.

Easy Languages - a youtube channel with several languages (basically they go around asking people on the street stuff so the language in the videos is really natural) & they also have breakaway channels for german, french, spanish, polish, italian, greek, turkish, russian, catalan & english

there’s also the LanguagePod101 youtube channels (e.g. FrenchPod101, JapanesePod101, HebrewPod101) which are super great for listening practice & language lessons as well as learning writing systems!

#language resources #this took me literally hours omg.#also if people have things to add feel free!

5K notes · View notes

bngrc · 2 years

Text

I can't stand people who go in the #duolingo tumblr tag just to shame the app for having the audacity to offer a Klingon course — if you're that morally opposed to the idea of people daring to do things for fun instead of spending 110% of their time and energy grimly fighting injustice, then why are you spending your precious time hanging out out here, on tumblr, a website populated entirely by clowns?

Go volunteer your time and unpaid labor to Duolingo’s language incubator.

That’s what the Klingon course developers did.

#duolingo #star trek

71 notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

Duolingo is NOT what it used to be.

“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.

I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.

In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.

No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.

It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.

Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.

And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.

It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.

~End rant.

#duolingo #langblr #huge language rant feel free to skip #evolution of duolingo #luis von ahn #duolingo welsh course #language learning

17K notes · View notes

trulyourmedicine · 7 years

Text

I am waiting

For my chinese baby in the incubator of duolingo...

#duolingo #chinese #mandarin #incubator

1 note · View note

eelparty · 2 years

Note

Ok so I just found your blog through your uquiz and I'm trying to figure out what you're learning bc,,,, um,,, High Valyrian??

Yeah no I agree. Like a weird amount of people are getting high valyrian which is weird bc when I was testing it it was a pretty rare answer. But yeah it should not be A Thing, and a bunch of people are commenting that Duolingo shouldn't be wasting their resources putting out these languages when there are many real useful languages people actually want.

But I'm PRETTY SURE that Duolingo's development works on a volunteer basis, which (a) is kinda shitty of them and (b) means that only people who know these languages and have an absurd amount of free time on their hands can even contribute to a course and (c) means that Duolingo doesn't actually have a huge amount of control as to which courses get developed.

I.e., Duolingo doesn't decide to make a course, volunteers do. So they're NOT seeking out and hiring people who speak the language, so they can't like dictate what languages those volunteers speak/want to work on. Which is why some courses come out of the incubator way sooner than others and sometimes courses just come out kind of bad?

In short, High Valyrian shouldn't be on Duolingo, sure, but I'm pretty sure it's not an issue of Duolingo improperly allocating resources, it's worse than that.

#ask #duolingo #languages #high valyrian #mine

3 notes · View notes

alvallah · 3 years

Text

There’s a Duolingo incubator for Tamil how cool!!

6 notes · View notes

starship-squidlet · 3 years

Text

Modern Stargate SG-1 Headcanons:

To go along with this post

Daniel:

Was always a nerd. Definitely had a “Greek mythology” phase growing up and never technically grew out of it, he just shifted a little more towards Egyptian mythology as he got older.

He felt closer to his parents when he was studying Egyptian mythology, and wound up turning it into a whole career by becoming an Egyptologist like they had been.

Guilty pleasure: Ancient Aliens.

Seriously, when he found out about the stargate and aliens and all of that his mind was absolutely blown. Even though he’d posited Ancient Aliens-esque theories himself, there was always a little part of him that went “there’s absolutely no way this is real and I might actually be a little crazy”. He did a little happy cry after going to Abydos and dealing with Ra and everything not just because all of that was over and they had won, but because he really was right and not crazy and all these theories he’d always wanted to believe but couldn’t quite bring himself to 100% believe really were true.

Aromantic/Asexual

But he still married Sha’re—he didn’t really have a choice.

Even after they got everything sorted out with Ra, and he chose to stay on the planet when Jack and the others left, he didn’t leave her. Initially, this was because he didn’t want her to be punished for not “pleasing” him or something like that (he had no idea how Kasuf and the other elders would react if he tried to send her away and didn’t want to risk her getting in trouble), but he did come to genuinely care for her. Once Kasuf and Skaara understood this about him, they were just as accepting of his identity as Sha’re was and became his family.

(Kasuf probably never truly understood what Daniel was trying to tell him about romantic/sexual attraction but he just smiled and nodded and accepted this weird kid anyways. All that mattered to him was that Sha’re was happy.)

When Sha’re was taken by Apophis, Daniel still joined SG-1 to get her back. He became almost immediate friends with Sam, who he always felt understood him on a level almost no-one else ever had, except for possibly Sha’re. Jack and Teal’c were friends on a different level, but they were no less close.

Has a lot of strong opinions on Google translate.

Tutors ESL students online (when he’s on Earth).

The only time his Duolingo streak was broken was when he ascended for a year.

Sam:

Sam Carter grew up a tomboy. While the other girls were all having tea parties and playing with dolls, she was building Lego spaceships with her brother and tying parachutes to plastic army men (and other toys) and throwing off the upstairs back porch of their house to see what would work.

In high school, she entered robotics tournaments and anything else she could get into.

She played softball and field hockey and was good at basketball even though she never joined the team. She took karate and tae kwon do and jui jutsu classes on the weekends. By the end of high school, she was teaching self defense classes at like the local Y or something.

She was also on the chess club in high school.

Got all As in math and science classes, but was more of a B student in any other subject—still above average, but she didn’t excell quite as much in the humanities.

Got into every college she applied to and got good scholarships to most of them, but decided to go to the Air Force Academy instead at the last minute without explanation to anyone.

No-one was more shocked by this move than Jacob, who had never expected her to follow in his footsteps. When pressed for answers by the school counselor, she said she felt it was her best chance to go to the moon someday.

In the academy, she excelled not only in her classes but in every physical test. She beat guys twice her size in hand-to-hand combat, had perfect aim on the gun range, and continued to get near perfect scores in her math and science classes in particular.

When Jacob expressed his pride in her accomplishments, it proved to be a mistake. She got into a slightly questionable relationship with one of the lowest-ranked guys in her year, who was always inches away from a dishonorable discharge. Her grades and performance slipped.

Some people suspected abuse when she would show up to classes with a black eye or split lip, but any suggestion of this to her would earn them the most wicked glare and a possible punch to the gut if no officers were around.

When Sam and her boyfriend got engaged, Jacob came to the school personally to try to talk her out of marrying him. He’d heard enough about the guy from his friends at the academy to feel the need to intervene, but this proved to be the worst possible choice. That weekend, Sam and her fiance ran off to elope. At the last second, she snapped to her senses and broke it off. Afterwards, she always denied that he had been the source of her bruises, but since those stopped after they broke up, not many people believed her.

She was one of the first people pulled for the stargate project and designed the majority of the dialing system herself. Once it was finished, she left the program to work on her doctorate.

When Apophis’s soldiers came through the gate and the stargate program was reopened, newly-doctorized Sam leapt at the chance to go to Abydos with Jack and his team. She never expected it to last beyond that one mission, but was certainly not complaining when they found the cartouche with more gate addresses!

She’s a very private person, and only discloses her feelings with those she trusts the most deeply. Daniel is usually the first to find out about stuff though—and not just romantic stuff; she also confides in him about things that she’s stressed or worried about, and he’s always the first or one of the first to hear her good news.

Besides Daniel, her closest friend is Janet Frasier. They went through basic training/the air force academy together, and reunited upon joining the stargate program. They started dating not long after joining the program, although they kept their relationship fairly quiet.

They went on a break after Janet adopted Cassie, and never quite found their way back to each other as partners, although they remained close friends. Never telling Janet how she really felt became Sam’s greatest regret after Janet died, and she devoted herself to Cassie to assuage her guilt over that.

Fierce feminist and a massive supporter of women in STEM and similar movements.

Disaster bisexual.

Jack

Jack and Sarah married fairly young and had Charlie not long after. He wasn’t exactly planned, but they loved him more than anything, and when he died it absolutely tore the two of them apart.

Jack went from a fairly happy-go-lucky, glass-half-full, ray of actual sunshine to a sarcastic, pessimistic, ball of anxiety literally overnight.

He was severely depressed after Charlie’s death, to the point where he actually had to be hospitalized.

When he was released, he moved back in with Sarah, even though they had been separated before his hospitalization. It wasn’t long after his release that he was pulled for the first mission to Abydos with Daniel.

After that mission, his nightmares changed. After Charlie’s death, they had all been about watching his son die, but after Abydos the nightmares now forced him to relive the deaths of his men, Daniel, and the boys who were killed fighting Ra. He and Sarah got divorced, and he went into early retirement.

To everyone’s shock, retirement turned out to be the best possible thing for Jack.

While he was still clearly depressed, he improved in leaps and bounds. He put a lot of energy into himself and his mental state, and, a year later when General Hammond called him back to Cheyenne Mountain, he was almost unrecognizable as a different person.

Going back to Abydos and seeing Daniel, Sha’re, and Skaara and his boys living and thriving was also really good for him. After Skaara and Sha’re were taken, he went into another spiral, but forced himself out of it by telling himself that he had to get them back. Was this healthy? Probably not. Did he care. Definitely not.

He didn’t really want to rejoin the air force and the stargate program, but did it more to watch over Daniel and to rescue Skaara than anything else.

He did come to truly love it, though, and even though the circumstances that brought him back were horrible he was still grateful to be part of SG-1.

Teal’c

Most of the Goa’uld system lords saw their female Jaffa as little more than breeding partners to the males, to create more Jaffa soldiers to serve their “gods”, and incubators for the juvenile symbiotes that all Jaffa carried, and Apophis was no exception.

Teal’c was fairly young when her father died, executed by Cronus for failing him in battle. She had already been in training with her father and Bra’tac—female Jaffa were expected to know how to fight, even if they were never called upon to serve their overlords in this way—determined to break out of the traditional path expected of her as a woman. Her father’s death lit a new fire within her, however, and she attacked her training with a new fierceness that unnerved even Bra’tac a little. She vowed to someday become the first prime of Apophis, Cronus’s greatest enemy, so she would one day have the pleasure of killing the god that ordered her father’s death.

The only woman in Apophis’s ranks, she literally clawed her way to the top of his Jaffa.

The other warriors feared her and whispered horrible stories of her victories in battle behind her back.

These were greatly exaggerated, of course, but Teal’c did nothing to discourage them. She wanted the most fearsome reputation she could get.

She gained a reputation for bloodthirstiness, fierceness in battle, and an almost animalistic nature when she fought. This caught Apophis’s attention, and she earned his favor.

Drey’auc was a childhood friend, and one of the only people Teal’c ever trusted enough to show her softer side to.

When Drey’auc’s husband was killed in battle, Teal’c took her and her newborn son Rya’c under her protection.

Deep down (largely thanks to Bra’tac and her father) Teal’c never truly believed that the Goa’uld were actually gods. She wanted to become Apophis’s first prime more for the power and respect that came with the position, and in hopes of having the chance to kill Cronus, than to actually serve him.

There were a lot of things that happened over her years in service to Apophis, both before and after becoming first prime, that really cemented her belief that the “gods” she had been raised to believe in were false, but she didn’t dare voice this to anyone but Bra’tac—she never even tonld Drey’auc, beyond a few vague hints.

When she met Jack, Sam, and Daniel and heard Jack promise to save the other prisoners, she saw it as her best choice to finally rise up against the oppression of the Goa’uld and jumped at the chance to help the humans.

On Earth, she realized that the humans there would trust her and respect her without the bloodthirstiness she’d been forced to show to the other Jaffa, and slowly began to relax slightly.

Seeing the respect shown to Sam, Janet, and other women on the base was basically revolutionary to her.

Slowly, she began to relax and open up to her new friends.

She sees herself as a protecter to her team in particular, and even to the SGC as a whole. Daniel, Sam, Jack, and Janet specifically are the people she feels the most protective over.

As time goes on, she slowly accepts SG-1 as a newfound family. As far as she’s concerned, the three of them are the siblings she never had, and she would do anything to protect them.

Drey’auc’s death rocked her to the core and led to a lot of questioning.

She almost left the SGC to take care of Rya’c, but it was actually Bra’tac who convinced her to stay, telling her that the Tau’ri were their best chance to defeat the Goa’uld once and for all and promising to take care of Rya’c in her name.

26 notes · View notes