tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH!
Still more native speakers than Navajo.
That’s what multiple genocides get you. A language rated as Vulnerable in UNESCO.
Still, there are about 170,000 people who speak Navajo, with about 8000 who only speak Navajo.
US: kills all the Navajo speakers
Also US: “Wow, there are so few Navajo speakers! We should use it as a secret military code!”
It wasn’t just Navajo. It was also encrypted/coded in Navajo to make it even more complicated on top of an already complex language. The code talkers were incredibly important to the war effort. The code was never cracked either. Makes me really proud of them for doing such a good (and dangerous) job.
And there are only 2000 fluent speakers of Hawaiian, let’s go colonialism!
Also doesn’t help that Navajo is an INCREDIBLY divergent language compared to basically everything else, even other languages native to North America save those of related languages.
It’s probably as close to a natlang ithkuil as linguistic science may have ever discovered, so acquiring it non-natively is A TON of work.
Also I may be confusing it with another indigenous language but IIRC there are some Navajo nation communities in which teaching the language to outsiders is seen as a GRAVE offense.
You can guess that the course on Duolingo isn’t exactly regarded as on par with their French and Spanish courses. That and their attempt at Hawaiian and the ensuant backlash over how bad both were are partially responsible for why Duolingo has yet to expand into a significant number of new languages.
I’m waiting for them to add Icelandic
I’m sorry, they only do real languages.
Does it really offer Navajo?
Anyone know a good place to learn Farsi (Persian). Duolingo doesn’t have it yet, if ever
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It’s a real shame duolingo doesn’t have Farsi (or none of the other apps I’m routinely using, for that matter). Let’s hope it becomes a thing sooner than later
I can’t find Doolish anywhere on the list though.
Oh wait, that language doesn’t exist.
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.
Can I put it on my resume?
I saw a resume with just ‘Military Spouse: 27 Years’ on it.
You can put whatever you want.
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 don’t think High Valyrian is an actual language…
It’s not. Because it lacks the elements for language. Everything you saw on the show was just translated for those specific sentences
What’s a real language?
A dialect with an army and a navy
Verbs, tenses, conjugations, syntax, pronouns, etc. It takes more than translating sentences and words to make a language
Your comment makes no sense whatsoever in this context, as High Valyrian, as used in the show, has all those things that you enumerated, and more.
Only in the context that whatever is being spoken was “translated”. Not that they’re actually any rules or an entire vocabulary or just pretty much anything that a language has to have to be a language. It’s very convincing and that it might be a language to the lay person like you or me who gets fooled into thinking that it is a language, but the actual linguists and people who study language and such, it’s most definitely not a language.
But does it do Mando’A?
But still no European Portuguese 😠
Wtf is European Portuguese, Portugal is in Europe.
There’s brazilian Portuguese
Yeah and then theres Portuguese
Wow you’re so smart. /s
Wtf is British English, England is in Britain.
Exactly
🇬🇧: English (Traditional)
🇺🇸: English (Simplified)
Not our fault the posh snobs wanted to sound different and the commoners copied them.
Prolly more people who want to learn elvish than European Portuguese. Oh, leaderboards
Last time I looked it still did a weird mix of American and European Spanish, too
It had me pick Latin American or Castilian Spanish when I started using Duolingo, I couldn’t tell you exactly how accurate it was though.
When was that? Last time I tried it was a couple of years ago.
As for the difference, outside of Spain the conjugation of Vosotros (you, plural) isn’t used, but speaking to strangers is much more formal. Also, there’s a lot of vocabulary differences which can be confusing for non-native speakers.
Good luck with your learning, it’s a great language :-)
About two years ago for me as well, they might have rolled it out shortly after you tried or maybe I was part of some A/B testing or something. But the setting seems to be saved because I’m never given exercises with vosotros in them.
¡Gracias! Vivo en California, así que hay mucha gente para practicar hablando conmigo, pero estoy tímido y practico solo con Duolingo por ahora.
Best thing would be to go to a Spanish speaking country for a holiday, once you’ve been forced to use it on strangers you’ll loose your language anxiety and it gets much easier (I live in Spain and work in Spanish, I’m not very good, but also no longer worried about muddling through).
As somebody who doesn’t naively speak Latin American Spanish but was exposed to it a lot growing up, the “th” sound for some words with “c” (like “gracias”) in Castilian Spanish really disturbs me. It sounds like everybody has a lisp.
It is a lisp, albeit on purpose … to further confuse things in parts of Spain with different languages the shared words don’t necessarily have that lisp!
Many asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects discovered by the Keck telescope, on the big island, have been given Hawaiian names, adding to the very few words I knew before, like aloha, mahalo, pahoa’hoa and a’a, the last two being types of lava, either runny or crumbly.
‘Okina only precede vowels and I think you’re confused about pahoahoa, it’s pahoehoe. Good job on a‘a, though!
Let me know when they get Phyrexian
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…
Try the Khan Academy next time.
KHAAAAAN!
Duolingo probably has an accreditation programme by now, considering most high schools use it.
Does anyone happen to know of an app or site that is good for learning Tagalog?
Seconding
The app Tandem (Language Exchange) has Tagalog as an option! It’s a pretty cool app. It connects you to native speakers so that they can have conversations with you and help you learn your chosen language.
Thanks. I will check it out.
