tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH!
Language learning apps work only to give you an overview over a language, to look if a language is worth learning. You really wanna learn? Search for someone who’s mother tongue it is in your vicinity and contact him. You’ll be surprised, how much fun that’ll be, your friendly Klingon in the neighborhood, crashing your door in at 3 a.m., hellish drunk, just to show you his new Gagh recipe, or you’ll find yourself as a slave in the fictional world of an obese old creep. Learning new languages is awesome, right?
High Valerian also doesn’t have all the ingredients to become an actual language. All I did was translate words in sentences into the language for the show, but Klingon, it is an actual language and has been developed enough that you can call it a language
Yeah, Klingon was deliberately designed to have object-verb-subject word order (among other unusual features) just to make it more alien.
I almost found a way to get university credit for learning Klingon. My downfall was that the Klingon Language Institute was not an “accredited” learning institution. I wonder if that’s changed yet…
Also courses for the language of the imaginary land of Finland.
I mean come on they call themselves Finnish.
Finnish, finish, finish line. It’s like they think we’re all stupid.
But still no European Portuguese 😠
Prolly more people who want to learn elvish than European Portuguese. Oh, leaderboards
Wtf is European Portuguese, Portugal is in Europe.
Wtf is British English, England is in Britain.
Fascinating that Duolingo tries to teach Navajo. The language is incredibly tonal and with sounds not native to most languages. I imagine it’s incredibly difficult to teach through an online service
Idk how duolinguo works (at all), but if the app can play the sounds for you and judge on your pronunciation, that would be quite enough to do the job. If it can handle mandarin (idk if it can) than any tonal based language is fair game.
I would think any decent speech to text could do a decent job determining pronunciation, if there isn’t a dedicated thing for that… either it registers or it gets garble and you try again.
“Courses” is a strong word for what Duolingo offers. It just shows you flashcards, but never explains grammar/syntax rules. Lingodeer is far superior.
Perdonally I’ve heard a ton of good things about Language Transfer despite not using it myself
The problem with all these alternatives is that the language selection is extremely limited. You want to learn English, French, German, or Spanish? Great, there are a million options for you! But if you go a bit more niche like Finnish or Irish, your options are much more limited. Of course there are ways to learn those languages - and much better ways than Duolingo. But Duolingo’s strength is offering a bunch of them, for free, in one place.
Note that I’m not trying to defend Duolingo, but rather deploring the lack of alternatives.
