Re: Duolingo Languages
Delos Sheppard
Some of these are better supported than others, and this depends on the popularity of the language. As a general rule of thumb: the more learners a language has on Duolingo, the more content and features it will get.
In terms of support, the best Duolingo courses are currently Spanish and French for IOS users. These are the two most popular languages on Duolingo and, as such, receive the most updates and all the latest features.
After French and Spanish, the next best courses, in my opinion, are German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese, as these are the only other courses that have stories, while the first three are also starting to receive support for Duolingo Max.
Croatian is an obvious idea. I still do not understand that is not offered. I know it has been rejected, but why. For political reasons I fear. But Croatian, Bosnian and Serbien are so similar that they could easily be ONE offer. Duolingo Should rethink their attitude.
I would also love to learn Persian on Duolingo. I started about 30 years ago with a private tutor but I could not continue then. I have been looking for a course but they are hard to find in my country.
I would definitely prefer that the course would teach the Persian alphabet because it is the way the language is written and I would like to be able to read the language, not only speak. The letters are not so hard to learn as far as I can remember from the last time I tried. ?
I would like to learn Catalan. Very fascinating language based on Vulgate regional Latin spoken by ancient Romans in the area of Catalonia. Must be many people who would be interested when they visit Catalonia.
Lithuanian would be fantastic! There are very few options for online learning and over 3 million native speakers. It is a beautiful country. Before I visited I needed to cobble together YouTube videos to build a small vocabulary.
Last but not least: if you want to give credit to learning 2000 words in one course, a course should contain 2000!
I took Indonesian and it stops on 1800. ?
Thai? Yes please!
Cebuano? Double yes!!
As a resident of Ethiopia, it would be amazing if Duo offered Amharic. Or English for Amharic speakers. It would be immediately applicable in my context. There is currently no online platform that offers it.
Armenian, Icelandic and Thai would be excellent. Personally, I would also like to see Dzongkha, Nahuatl and Quechua although I doubt they would be so popular. It would be great if Duolingo also extended some of the shorter courses such as Finnish and Latin., particularly Finnish as it is such a difficult language.
Please add Ukrainian taught by Polish! There is a huge necessity to learn the language of refugees who came to Poland. And the knowledge of English is quite poor at the generation 45+ due to the communist times. Moreover, Ukrainian is similar to Polish, so it get us frustrating if we cannot translate exact meanig of words in different cases or gender, as they are at both languages.
Hello!
I would love to see and learn the Samoan language on here. I would even than pay for the Super Max yearly family membership for that!!! That is how excited I would be.
Please I beg beg beg pretty please for the Samoan language, America Samoa, to be on Duolingo as soon as humanly possible. I will pay for maximum membership, please.
Hello,
I am surprised that the Kabyle language is not available for learning, as it is a living language, and I know several people around me who would like to learn it. As for me, I can speak it but I have some gaps in writing.
I would love to be able to use Duo to learn Isga (the Stoney Language) from the Nakoda Sioux. There are a few apps that the nations have put together but they work more like a dictionary and are less interactive.
I really miss Croatian. Croatia is a very popular holiday destination in Europe. Also Bosnian and Serbian are virtually the same (more similar than European and Brazilian Portuguese). So if you speak Croatian you can also communicate in Serbia, Bosnia-H. and Montenegro. So Croatian is even more useful than you might think at first sight. Also many Croats, Serbs and Bosnians live all over Western Europe.
I am a german that uses Duolingo mainly to brush up my english skills as also my uncle and grandma used for this. I started as I realized that thanks to Crunchyroll offering me so many animes in GerSub, my english level started to decline and so I decided to give it a try. Once I am complete with the whole english course I think I will either go on to Japanese or South Korean, maybe Latin for ancient history and Italian for holiday as I am from Austria.
Klingon is the fantasy language first created for Star Trek in 1967 by G. L. Coon, and later further developed by Marc Okrand. It has entered popular culture over the past half century such that even classics like Shakespeare and parts of the Bible have been translated into the language. It is thought to have the largest population of speakers of any fictional language.
Created to be a global language in the hope of eliminating wars and conflict, it is thought that there are today around one thousand native level speakers, and hundreds of thousands who use it actively to some level of competance. It is the only conlang to have achieved this level of international acceptance, and it is notable that it is a language available on Google Translate.
Duolingo is making a significant play for the educational English market, and has supplemented their English course with an English assessment that is currently accepted by more than 4600 universities from around the world, and as support for Student Visa applications to Ireland. As a completely online assessment, it gained significant traction during Covid-19 lockdowns.
Cate is a language enthusiast sharing her language learning journey here. Apart from her native English (albeit 'Strine'*!), as an adult she has also learned Auslan (Australian Sign Language) to approximately a C1 level, Dutch to around B1/2, French to around A2, and has a smattering of other languages.
After the closure of the forums due to cost-benefit reasons, I wonder if Duolingo might decide to remove any of the courses as well. I am especially concerned about the less popular ones. I know it has never happened before. But now I'm not so sure of anything... Do you remember tinycards?
This might be wandering into proprietary territory, but there's no reason languages with very small vocabularies couldn't set up something like Duo. Maybe not with a dynamic lesson interface, but with all the text info and audio on a wiki type platform.
In my opinion Navajo should not have been released from the incubator (no audio nor tips, and just a handful skills - but the sentence discussions are hilarious, a lot of guessing in order to try to understand something), probably not Hawaii either.
They have so far not removed courses, but the maintenance of some courses has diminished. The course in place is still perfectly good. There is a question of whether or not more will be added. I believe this could still happen. Remember, their focus is to keep the more commonly-learned languages well maintained, for obvious reasons. Removing? I don't think that would happen.
Pretty sure we can expect that the Navajo course, like the Hawaiian course, will only grow in the future (the CEO is extremely proud of indigenous languages) and I doubt very much if any languages will be removed.
For a long, long time, Swahili had no voices to go with it. This was actually an appeal for me because it allowed me to listen to podcasts on my phone while doing duolingo. Now Swahili has several voices and there have been additions - especially in the idiom section - just in the last year.
The thing is, some courses have been neglected for years. Maybe I'm wrong, but since the ending of the contributor program, I get the impression that it's been getting worse all the time. And it's not only a problem of the smallest courses (I'm thinking for example about the Italian course for English speakers). I'm actually surprised that the Swahili course got some updates. I'm glad to know that.
The more commonly-learned languages had paid contributors and regular maintenance because of it. As for the lesser-learned languages, active volunteers who remained on are to thank for answering sentence discussion questions and making any adjustments.
Normally big companies cut, they don't expand staff. However, the reasons given for removing the forum were about costs, and it makes me wonder if they have lost money or plan to spend money on the courses instead. But this is all speculation. A lot of people are still guessing why the forums were removed, and that is something that we'll never really know the answer to since we're not working for Duolingo. But if they want to be a leader with language-learning, they will continue to pay people to maintain what they have, and any other languages that they think will draw new users.
There are plenty of complaints on the Spanish forum for removing Guaran (the language mainly spoken in Paraguay, which is of indigenous origin). The Esperanto courses from French, Spanish and Portuguese have also been removed.
@SweNedGuy(function(script) script.previousElementSibling.href = script.dataset.baseurl + 'memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&un=' + encodeURIComponent(script.dataset.username); script.remove();)(document.currentScript); What's wrong with Guaran? Why have they removed Esperanto courses for French, Spanish and Portuguese?
Guaran is spoken by more people than any indigenous language in the US or Canada. It has been adopted as an official language in Paraguay, also spoken by Non-Spanish speaking immigrants as a lingua franca. There seems to be some dialectal variation and a few native speakers had their own idea about the standard to be adopted.
I speak Spanish with a Castilian accent and English with a UK 'received pronunciation' accent. But that doesn't make me consider the DL English and Spanish courses useless because the accents they happen to teach differ from mine.
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