"तू, तुम, आप"
Translation:You, you, you
32 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I agree. Duolingo needs alot more courses; there ar too many people who want to learn various languages; including non-English speakers who want to learn a second/foreign language other than English. The last few months hav been frustrating, with no new courses being added to Incubator, nor courses graduating from it, nor courses promoted out of Beta. Why?
The largest languages worldwide ar probably (number of nativ speakers, in millions, very approximate):
-
Chinese (Mandarin), 1000
-
Hindi, 550 (true number is not well-defined; what counts as a dialect of Hindi versus a separate language?; do you count people who ar bilingual in regular Hindi and a closely related lect?; do you count Urdu?)
-
Spanish, 450
-
English, 420
-
Bengali, 260
-
Portuguese, 200
-
Russian, 170
-
Punjabi, 135
-
Japanese, 125
-
German, 100
Besides these, there ar likely 6 other languages spoken by at least 80 million people: Vietnamese, French, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Javanese.
I omit Arabic on the grounds that there ar mutually unintelligible forms of Arabic, and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is essentially Classical Arabic (essentially, it is to modern vernacular Arabics what Latin is to the modern Romance languages), so essentially no-one speaks MSA nativly. See https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/12443/_Journal_of_Nationalism_Memory_Language_Politics_The_Arabic_Language_A_Latin_of_Modernity.pdf “The Arabic Language: A Latin of Modernity?”
My challenge for Duo: completely connect, by the end of 2030, the top 6 languages on this list. That is, there would be, via every one of these 6 languages, there would be courses teaching all of the other 5. So there would be e.g. Spanish for Bengali Speakers, and vice-versa. This requires 6×5 = 30 courses, some of which already exist. Duo, please hurry up and finish the English for Bengali Speakers course. (Again, why does this course not get done? French for Japanese Speakers got done, and graduated from Beta.)
Of the language-pairs among the top 6, i think the only one where finding enuf persons fluent in both languages, might be a problem; is Bengali/Portuguese. Even that can be remedied:
-
You only need a handful of Contributors to build the course.
-
You can hav a strong campaign to call out to people that Duo needs them for this project, and tell them how good it is to help Duo.
-
You can persuade some people (probably people who already know at least one language in said language-pair at least partly), to learn one or both languages more thoroughly, so they can contribute.
-
Contributors don’t hav to be totally fluent in both languages; being able to translate accurately is more important than being able to speak fluently; it is okay if one has to look up a term in a dictionary occasionally.
-
Even people who know only one language in a given pair, can help by pointing out obviously bad usage. E.g. in Hindi for English Speakers, there is still the frustration that they accept as correct ‘She studies very less’, and reject as incorrect the appropriate ‘She studies much less’; and this is even tho the course is over three years old.
I chose top 6; because 6 is the largest number n such that the number of courses needed to connect all of the top n languages, namely n×(n – 1), is less than 33, the number of Duo courses taught via English, excluding ones still in Beta or Incubator; so 6 might be a good number. Also, i don’t want to get to the point of diminishing returns.