Slovenian for Chinese speakers

[mitja]

At the Department for Asian studies (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts) we formed a group of professors and students who would like to build Slovenian language course for Chinese speakers.
Anyone else interested?

[jimnicholson]

You can apply here: https://incubator.duolingo.com/apply

PS: I would mention in the application what the professors are of... like linguistics or whatever.

[mitja]

I've applied in Incubator and others will do it too. I've started the thread here, as instructed by Duolingo how-tos.
They are/were all teaching Chinese language, one of them is specialised in Chinese linguistics.

[Multi0Lingual4]

I don't honestly see Duo building such a course anytime soon, but I would hate to see your skills go to waste. You can try other platforms such as Memrise or perhaps even make a tinycards deck!

[MitjaSaje]

I am really glad that so many discussants and interest has appeared in a few days. Actually the idea is quite serious. As one of the founders of the Department of Asian studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana I strongly support this idea and I made contacts at the Department for Slovenian language as well as the Department of English language to find enthusiasts willing to participate in this project. The aim is to offer Slovenian language to the world population of English and Chinese speakers. So both courses will be prepared simultaneously and there is support of the linguists’ at all three departments. Slovenian is spoken by rather small population, but has long cultural tradition and is one of the most archaic Indo-European languages, has a bit more complicated grammatical structures with similarities to Sanskrit, but could be very interesting for linguist fans and a very good basis lo learn all other Slavic languages. So I am looking forward for the support from duolingo community to stimulate us in our endeavors.

[jzsuzsi]

I think Duo should build a Slovenian for English speakers course first.

[Hermesianax]

Why? If these professors and students can offer such a course first, why should English necessarily have priority over it?

[WillowsofXihu]

The only reason would be that not nearly as many Chinese speakers are interested in learning Slovenian as English speakers, and people proficient in all three would be required to then convert the Chinese-Slovenian course to English-Slovenian.

That being said, this sounds wonderful to me (English Chinese speaker), especially as it would probably be a while before Duo gets around to Slovenian. @mitja, if this goes through, I would be happy to help!

[MitjaSaje]

"We have the plan to build both courses Slovenian for English and for Chinese speakers simultaneously. Why Chinese? - Well it will be a professional challenge for us trying to find some new sollutions and make it more user friendly, specifically avoiding rigid translations that often burden such courses. Then it is an opportuniti to offer to vast Chinese community a possibility of learning in some way marginal and not so well know language with rich cultural and interesting linguistic backgroud, and third it would be of great practical help to tho those Chinese which have so far settled in Slovenia.

[branka_g]

Our Centre for Slovene as a Second/Foreign Language (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts) also applied for a Slovene course in Incubator a few years ago, but nothing happened. That is why we built our own free of charge online course for beginners available here: www.slonline.si

It is available in English, but we will be adding translations in German, Spanish and Russian shortly as well as in Italian and French. Chinese is one of the languages we will add in the future too.

[mitja]

We are working on that too, but that is another group of people and the discussion is going on another forum thread.