[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon on Duolingo

[Felix Malmenbeck]

peqIm!

As many of you have no doubt already heard, Klingon is headed to Duolingo!
https://www.duolingo.com/course/tlh/en/Learn-Klingon-Online


Duolingo is a popular language learning platform which is free to use and syncs up across multiple platforms (currently: PC, Android, iOS and Windows Phone).

As of last year, Duolingo had around     60 million registered users and 20 million active users, so we can definitely give Klingon some exposure. Indeed, we currently have 7552 people signed up to be notified once the course becomes available.


Currently, the working group consists of André and myself. For the past week, we've been testing out the software, looking at the challenges and opportunities it presents, and trying to create a basic structure for the first part of the course.

Initially we had quite a few technical issues that stunted our progress: It seems the system was not invented with an agglutinating, case-sensitive, apostrophe-using language in mind!

However, Duolingo's staff has been incredibly helpful, and the most troublesome problems have been either engineered away or circumvented.


We have several really good applications from people who'd like to join our team, and we're currently working for the admins to unlock two more positions.

More positions will open up gradually as we go along, so if you feel like you have the knowledge and energy to contribute, head over to the Duolingo Incubator and send in an application:

http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/tlh/en/status


Once we have a working version of the course, the course will enter beta testing. At this point, it's crucial that we have a lot of people participating:

Experienced klingonists can contribute by taking the course and looking for mistakes, complaining that their correct translations were deemed incorrect by the system, commenting on the finer points of aspect and other pieces of grammar, and so forth.


However, we also hope we'll get a lot of new and intermediate learners taking the course, so that they can point out to us if it's too difficult or too easy; if there's too much repetition or too little; if the explanation texts make sense to a new learner...


...and, last but not necessarily least: We'll need their help to fine-tune the course to be accessible, interesting and fun! It is our sincere hope that within a few months' time, any of Duolingo's 20 million active users will be able to start learning Klingon with a few flicks of their thumb, and that many of them will discover that it's actually a really interesting language.


Best wishes,

loghaD
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