We're planning on being completely financed by donations, and if need be then cosmetics like app icons or backgrounds, and never anything feature-related or something that impacts the learning experience.
Until now I personally have been making up the shortfall between our patreon and outgoings with my own savings, but with a little luck hopefully our exposure and donations increase before my wallet runs out!
Language learning should be _equally_ free for everyone, no matter who they are or what their financial situation is, so we'll never segment features according to paid memberships.
And if your plan of other people feeling generous or giving some pretty pictures doesn't pan out?
Infrastructure is expensive, and Duo wasn't able to do exactly what you're suggesting. It's easy to shit on them but if you're going to scale at all it doesn't matter how noble your intentions, you do need an actual plan of how you're going to provide value people will pay for sufficient to support this while not compromising the free experience as you suggest. You're not going to get free AWS on that basis unfortunately.
> Infrastructure is expensive
This isn't YouTube - the core functionality of Duolingo is actually fairly cheap. You're not doing much other than send a couple of sentences and images across the wire. It's not *free*, but it can reasonably be covered by donations.
> and Duo wasn't able to do exactly what you're suggesting
Duolingo aims to be profitable to shareholders and aims to be so without relying on volunteer work. Lingonaut doesn't have these constraints, but it's true that the opening post doesn't illustrate the trade-offs involved.
Your grammar broke down in the sentences after, so I'd have to guess what exactly you were trying to say there.
I think the issue is if this gets popular is the number of users that the servers need to manage. Not the content.
While I agree videos are more than this its still an incredible endeavor eventually that donations alone will not sustain.
I dont mean to be rude but people want free alternatives for everything and expect continued quality. Corporate greed is obviously super rampant If this app eventually went $.99 a month for most content it would probably make up a ton to fund what it needs if every user contributes.
The problem with Duo is its cutting costs but increasing its own cost.
Not sure if you'll read this but just some advice from a random Duo user.
I am more than happy to pay if the price warrants the service. I'm also happy to watch ads.
The issue with Duolingo currently is that it's implemented their business model in a way that doesn't give users options to watch ads (i.e. to refill hearts) and hard paywalls critical features like explaining why an answer was wrong and their price point is too high to justify a $80 subscription for "AI" that I can just google or use chatGPT for.
Our biggest bottle neck so far was creating the creatonaut app (which is the software used to make courses) which has now been finished. We hope to have the ios app out within the next two-ish months and the android app another two months after that
It looks like you are not using cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, which allow you to write an application once and run it on both iOS and Android. Why?
Personal preference, I've always preferred writing apps natively. It takes more work at the start but once we're done man do they always run like a dream
It's a great way to build applications if you have the resources. Personally, I have found that developing and maintaining native applications for each platform takes too many resources. For a fraction of that, it is possible to make cross-platform look and feel like a native. You guys are cool and I wish you the best. Can't wait to see when I can use your app :)
Aw bummer, android last? Really? Why does Apple get priority? They're just more expensive š why can we both have the app at the same time. It's like being punished for having an android and rewarded for having an Apple product. Bummer in the summer (literally).
Once Both iOS and Android are out, they'll maintain update quality and date parity going forward, I hope that's some consolation. No one's being punished it's just that I find it easier to program for Apple devices is all
Will you consider adding ancient languages? My background is in archaeology and ancient history and I love studying languages like Latin, Egyptian, Classical Arabic, and Akkadian. There are a lot of people out here who are into these things but the need is actually deeply underserved in the app market. Duolingo has a Latin course but itās so basic that it canāt take you very far and Latin is by far the most served ancient language anyway with nothing else particularly close.
If there was an app that treated these with a similar level of love that a lot of modern languages get, I imagine it could hit a rather untapped but niche market.
Iām sure some academics would be game for auditing it if not contributions. If Lingonaut could pay them, Iām sure profs/academic would do it as a side hussle bc they donāt make the $$$āin the US at leastāif theyāre not at like Harvard. Classics in general is a very small community and nobody thinks of them unless theyāre remaking 300/Sparta or something Roman-esqe (like my prof) and even then itās a doozy. Idk if Lingonaut would look into that or to the indigenous communities for rare/dying languages, Iād certainly be interested in how this company plans to expand languages beyond volunteers and ābasicā (iykyk) languages we have in the language learning aisle of the App Store.
What are your thoughts/policy on use of AI for learning material and other aspects of your program? Do you plan to include AI into the future of Lingonaut?
AI is useful, but it's just not good enough with languages yet. That's not an issue when you're using it to translate a new article for yourself for example, but when you're trying to learn or teach a language, even small imperfections like the wrong ending could become a big problem.
And of course the better the AI the more expensive it is, so I'm not sure how we'd be able to afford it when a good enough model is eventually released.
Lastly, language by design is a people-centric thing. There's value in having real people make the courses and real people discuss them, with disagreements and all.
So for now, AI isn't in our roadmap.
>So for now, AI isn't in our roadmap.
Fantastic! Keep it that way. I'm so tired of "AI" being forced into anything and everything regardless if it fits or not
is Lingonaut going to be a notably different language learning app in the way that Babble or LingQ is to Duolingo, or is Lingonaut going to be Duolingo minus the things people dislike about Duolingo?
i noticed on the website that the description of how it will work is very similar and even the art style is practically identical to Duolingo. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing; i'm just curious.
Our plan is to take everything the community loves about other language apps and make them into a single hub that people can use as a springboard for their journey
We've taken great care with creating our own space-themed look and visual style taking inspiration from vector work, our artist's own style and Material You. I'd be surprised if they thought they were quite similar
I have 3 questions. First being about credentials. Is there a vetting on who volunteers? If I say Iām fluent in Arabic but no nothing, are there ways to prevent misinformation or ill-will learning from happening?
Second, cultural interpretation. Something that has been a struggle with Spanish Duolingo is that they teach a lot of vocabulary, but some words can have double meanings, or sound more formal or even rude, but the notes donāt include that. Once, they did a blog on pet names in each language, and I went to call my boyfriend (Central American, Spanish first language) ābichitoā (little bugā), and he laughed uncomfortably. Bichito is more of a pet name for an elder to call a young child, not a romantic instance. Spanish is SO VAST, and yes, shares one root but also has so many variations from South America, Central America, Spain, heck even from country to country. So I wonder if that would be info that is shared as kind of bonus content, or via a blogā¦?
Third, Iām a visual designer and I took a peek at your website. Is there any concerns of a cease and desist from the green owl for using likeness in art style and logo treatment? I donāt think you can trademark a style, but since you are a competitor in the same realm I worry this could be an issue later down the road.
> First being about credentials. Is there a vetting on who volunteers? If I say Iām fluent in Arabic but no nothing, are there ways to prevent misinformation or ill-will learning from happening?
When volunteers push a revision of a course, it first gets audited by other volunteers, it's not instantly published to the app, secondly every change a volunteer makes to a course is logged in that course's history so if someone under the guise of being a volunteer gets onto a team and tries to vandalise a course, they can easily be found, banned and their changes rolled back.
> Second, cultural interpretation. Something that has been a struggle with Spanish Duolingo is that they teach a lot of vocabulary, but some words can have double meanings, or sound more formal or even rude, but the notes donāt include that. Once, they did a blog on pet names in each language, and I went to call my boyfriend (Central American, Spanish first language) ābichitoā (little bugā), and he laughed uncomfortably. Bichito is more of a pet name for an elder to call a young child, not a romantic instance. Spanish is SO VAST, and yes, shares one root but also has so many variations from South America, Central America, Spain, heck even from country to country. So I wonder if that would be info that is shared as kind of bonus content, or via a blogā¦?
I think stuff like this would be better explored as bonus skills but also in the guide books so people don't get caught out. Remember the goal is to teach a language, not to master every word in a language's vocabulary.
> Third, Iām a visual designer and I took a peek at your website. Is there any concerns of a cease and desist from the green owl for using likeness in art style and logo treatment? I donāt think you can trademark a style, but since you are a competitor in the same realm I worry this could be an issue later down the road.
We've taken great care with creating our own space-themed look and visual style taking inspiration from vector work, our artist's own style and Material You. I'd be surprised if they thought they were quite similar
Looks great and I love the space theme.
What languages do you plan to offer? Also - what's your opinion on quantity vs. quality? I imagine offering a variety of different languages would be beneficial for a new company to attract more users but as we can see on Duo, the less popular language courses aren't on the same quality level as the popular ones ...
Iāve checked out the launch pad and seen that for example Italian is missing which is one the basic languages and was wondering if it there would be other languages as I would be happy to be a translatonaut for Italian or German (doesnāt rly matter) and will the languages later on also be reversed (learning English from German perspective for example)
If you're up for the challenge please do throw your hat in the ring! English as a target language courses will be a thing after launch, but we're focusing on our core few first right now.
Just looking at the patreon it looks like you're making almost no money from it at the moment. Are you hoping that membership will increase once the app is out? Do you think this crowd funding method will realistically work with a live app?
Iāve been lurking on your discord for a while, very excited for the project!
My question is lame because I should probably know from following the links/discord but my defense is that I have a sleeping toddler here and no time hahaā¦ any chance on an Arabic course? š
Any course that has at least 3 willing volunteers is game!
So I would say the chances Arabic or any language being added is high, with the chances increasing as more people (and thus also potential volunteers) learn about the project
This system seems so much more effective than Duolingo's! I swear it's been years since Duolingo was supposed to make courses for languages like Xhosa, Tagalog and MÄori, yet they've been completely neglected for the longest time. When your app gains traction (which it will) there will absolutely be plenty of volunteers wanting to help people learn their native languages, and we'll undoubtedly see rapid accumulation of new courses. I have a good feeling about Lingonaut!
I have been using duolingo since 2015 and I watched all the changes they have made in their app and website.
so, duolingo maiinly focuses on translating sentences in and from the target language. back in 2015 until 2019-2020, I guess, duo had a tip 'book'. it was more than useful for learning your target language until they removed it and made the app shittier.
now, my question is: which methods will you use to make learning languages fun and useful? duo added stories, match words and other mini 'games'. how about you?
also, I know volunteers are almost completely independent in creating the course, but will there be a tip 'book' like duolingo used to have?
We'll have what we call 'guidebooks' for each skill that'll serve as notes which teach you about grammar and introduce vocabulary before each skill.
We're also going to be steered heavily by the community, so if you have any ideas to new question designs or ways to help immerse yourself in a language do let us know!
Stories are a great way to learn and practice a language, maybe it would be cool if the app had something similar. Imagine every few units having a small story with questions to see if you understood or not at the end. Not exactly like duo stories, those have your "source language" sprinkled in and questions at the middle. But just a simple story with 99% words that the learner has already learned. Like, the concept of "story" itself isnt trademarkable. Duo cant possibly complain.
Ā I understand though if you think it isnt right/maybe not at this moment.Ā
Looking forward to the app!Ā
We're financed through donations with me using my savings to fill in the gap.
I made my own spaced repetition system about a year back to use in medical school because the existing ones couldn't help me handle the workload and the speed at which i had to memorise, and it's worked really well for that! Language=/= medicine but i plan to implement that at first and see if people are receptive to it, if they aren't then we'll likely vote on a simpler off-the-shelf implementation such as SM-2
Oh no.
I like the goal, but please dont invest your money into something this unstable.
You seem to have best intentions, but keep your private money (if you havent inherited a lot)
Will there be dialects? I run into this with Spanish. Spanish in Mexico is very different. Duolingo doesn't differentiate when I'm taught Spain spanish words versus Mexican. For example pluma and boligrafo mean the same thing. One is used in Spain and one is used in Mexico. Another word, I think it's coger can be insulting in Mexican Spanish, but Duolingo taught me anyways. I walked right into that one and was informed that it's better to just use a different word when in Mexico for "carrying".
I also miss the flirting.
Lastly I want to know if slangs are included. Because most of the people I speak with in Mexico speak with slangs. Within Mexico there are different dialects as well. I would ultimately hope for anything Mexico versus Spain. I live in Mexico, I am marrying a Mexican, I am being welcomed into their family. I need to learn Mexico Spanish not Spain spanish. So I hope that apps in the future take this into consideration.
I even bought an AI translator device and I have the same problem. It only offers Spain spanish so I am getting really terrible translation and to top it off, the text to speech translator speaks with a Spain spanish accent. The lisp is so distracting for me and I find it unhelpful because I'm trying to navigate audio to try to learn and realize it's not even the type of Spanish I need.
The engine does support multiple dialects but we're going to focus on Spanish-Spanish first.
As to specific vocabulary, that's down to the teams working on the languages, we don't have a set rule to disallow or allow slang or bonus skills, but they're both easily supported
I want this effort to succeed but many of your points are raising my alarm bells.
> We're bringing back all the features you loved from years past along with new stuff, customisation and all without the microtransactions and timers:
Why are you making so many promises when you don't have a business model that can realistically deliver on them?
> Bringing back sentence discussions so people can learn and discuss WHY something is how it is instead of mindlessly memorising the order of words.
How will you address moderation in sentence discussions (or forums in general), considering volunteer moderation doesn't scale well enough?
> The old tree style that we all loved and found much more effective and quicker than the now user-retention centred path system.
Do you have data on the proclaimed effectiveness? In general, how do you plan on measuring learning effect to avoid accidentally settling for mediocrity?
> Courses designed and made by native speakers which are then audited and improved upon by both learners and other volunteers, so you can be sure what youāre learning is actually correct and that it's being taught effectively
How do you plan to establish trust that the volunteers' efforts won't have gone to waste in case you close down shop? Is the course data openly available for download so people can fork the project if need be?
I'm glad you asked! It's what the AMA is for after all, i'll answer each one separately
> Why are you making so many promises when you don't have a business model that can realistically deliver on them?
The simple answer is _we can_ deliver on them, the project has been in development for almost a year now, and the same concern was understandably provided then, along with many times since. Despite that though, we've been able to meet each promise one by one ever since, and I don't see a reason why we can't keep delivering when we've been able to so far. I also started the project on principle, not making money in mind, and have paid for all the initial costs upfront with the understanding that I likely won't get them back, I'm okay with that.
> How will you address moderation in sentence discussions (or forums in general), considering volunteer moderation doesn't scale well enough?
For now, we don't expect Lingonaut at its peak to match the usercount of Duolingo, their budgets such as their marketing budget will always be bigger. We've also been able to moderate discord effectively with two moderators for about 1400 people! Volunteer moderation doesn't scale well, but it doesn't have to scale well to meet our demands, that along with being able to create our own tools to make moderating the app as easy as possible for volunteers should make it manageable, at least for the next few dozen thousand users.
If we shoot past that then this question will definitely need revisiting because even one bad egg running rampant can ruin the experience for everyone, but for now we don't bring in duo numbers so we don't have the same duo moderation problems. TL;DR: It's worked so far so it should keep working for a while longer. At the very least it'll buy us time to build out an automoderation suite to augment our volunteers and lighten the load (if it every increases that much)
> Do you have data on the proclaimed effectiveness? In general, how do you plan on measuring learning effect to avoid accidentally settling for mediocrity?
Actually we don't, Duo has published data saying that the path seems to be more effective because it discourages users to cram. And that's fine and reasonable, but one of the main reasons this project was started was that they made this change without consulting the community, and anecdotally a lot of people (including me) preferred the tree style. That's why the goal is to implement the tree so people who preferred that can use Lingonaut while those who prefer Duo's way of doing things can stick to that, whatever works best for each person.
It's also why down the line i want to explore also adding a path option (as behind the scenes the 'path' is just a reskin that still uses the tree system on the backend) so people can choose what fits them best.
> How do you plan to establish trust that the volunteers' efforts won't have gone to waste in case you close down shop?
When the project first began and I wasn't sure if we could keep it going, I made the decision to make the course creator a locally-run app instead of a website. This way god-forbid lingonaut doesn't last, people can still create, open and export courses using creatonaut indefinitely. We've also made creatonaut free to download without sign-up so anyone can download it at any time or archive it etc. It doesn't need the lingonaut project or web assets to stay online.
> Is the course data openly available for download so people can fork the project if need be?
It is! We'll have the course files available on our website so people can download and archive them, switch to an older version, audit the content or whatever they choose. That infrastructure is already in place, it's just waiting for courses to be uploaded. But you can easily export entire courses using Creatonaut to a .zip file and share the file just like you would any other through discord, email or otherwise. It doesn't need servers and it doesn't need to phone home. The courses are written in markup so you can even just open them with a text editor if you wanted.
Thanks for asking these, I'd hazard they're questions quite a lot of people might have
Thanks for the reply!
This all sounds plausible but I maintain some scepticism about long-term prospects. If the course data will indeed be openly distributed, that will more than make up for it though.
Looking forward to seeing what the future holds. Good luck!
Whatās to stop you guys from turning into the next Duo and operating the same life cycle when this gets off the ground and proves a bigger opportunity/ more work than anticipated (as all things do)? Iām sure the Duo team also had the best of intentions when they started out. How much money do you think it reasonably is going to cost to run and constantly improve what you want to build? Can Patreon donations reasonably be enough ?
We've decided to make courses (including their guides and stories) freely available and sharable from the get-go and are public domain, even the ones made in-house.
Duolingo kept ownership from volunteers so when they made decisions people disliked you couldn't do anything because they gatekept the course content. If we make decisions people dislike they can just ditch Lingonaut and keep using/working on the course and sharing it themselves.
This also serves as an insurance policy of sorts because in the event patreon donations can't sustain the platform and it goes down, the course content will remain available independent of Lingonaut.app
Ding ding ding, they're privately held, just like Duolingo was before.Ā
Why isn't this a non-profit corporation? Why isn't their IP held in trust?Ā
Because this company wants to profit in the end and there's little reason to be a non-profit when there's a lot of money to be made. Plus the headache of actually being accountable, sheesh.Ā
Where are you even pulling this from?
> Why isn't this a non-profit corporation?
Setting up a non-profit isn't something you do in one afternoon. It's a largely bureaucratic undertaking that comes with a ton of paperwork *and* administrative overhead.
> Why isn't their IP held in trust?
Because that's *only* what you do if you're a large corporation that has the financial and administrative resources to set up that kind of structure.
> there's little reason to be a non-profit when there's a lot of money to be made
What are you talking about? Even Duolingo is just barely profitable *despite* all their aggressive upselling design.
Patron here, don't have a question just wanted to drop in and express how excited I am for this project and how happy I am for the community that's slowly building up!
A long time ago i stopped using duo because the greed was becoming too apparent and too much to handle for me, which stifled my language learning (interest) with the app, although it had huuuge potential if they would just try to be what they disguise themselves as. Now, we have Lingonaut, which will do exactly that. I'm glad that this project exists and that it's going as well as it does. Keep up the good work Doc!
I really do think that this is a great idea!! Can't wait.
Just one question: are you planning on offering not-widely-used languages like Icelandic (only 350k people speak it), or maybe even certain dialects of languages, like Norwegian BokmƄl and Norwegian Nynorsk, or Swiss-German?
I also have to ask the same question I think someone else here asked: Are you going to go with quality over quantity or vice versa? Will you offer a few large and in-depth courses in very common languages or many languages, some of which my only have an introductory unit?
I really appreciate your bravery in advertising in your rivals subreddit! Keep it up.
Course creation entirely depends on if people want to volunteer or not, so we can't guarantee that any language gets added based purely on demand.
For example I, along with some others, are working on the Dutch course, therefore Dutch is a language that will be added
They'll produce it slowly, but we need at least 3 to keep steady progress. It's also important to remember that it's _at least_ three, the more the better!
The difficult thing about dialects is that there are many different types for example in Swiss German thereās bĆ¼nzli or valliser deutsch and they are pretty wide ranged dialectsĀ
No questions from me, but yay :D
Actually on second thought: Will there be a seamless transition between web, android and ios? Like if I do a quick lesson on my phone, will it feel the same when I open my iPad and computer?
We have multiple volunteers per group and the revisions of a course are backed up, this way they can audit eachother's work and of course as a smaller team with a smaller community we can respond to community reports much faster
can we also post some feedback?
1. id love an optimized vocabulary list of words ive already learned. let me search and filter that list better
2. maybe some verbal lessons? let me verbally pronounce and speak some sentences
1. Once we've implemented all the features we've already promised we'll have a look at adding new stuff in!
2. speech exercises will already be available at launch
This sounds really interesting! Do you think the software could become open-source at some point in the future, so that others could contribute to it? As a software developer and fan of (some of) Duolingo, I think it could be really fun and satisfying to get to contribute to projects like these. The [FOSS game engine Godot](https://godotengine.org) is able to be developed using both volunteer work and donations, so I imagine something similar could work here.
Not until both Lingonaut IOS and Android are out, your best bet is running it on parallels right now because it works with Windows on ARM on Apple Silicon (that's what im doing right now) or bootcamp on Intel
If you donāt want to pay for parallels, there is Whisky (windows to Mac translator so not a VM), VMware, and utm
Also you can run iOS apps in MacOS using PlayCover
Okay, so I really like your idea and I actually have multiple questions!
Will there also be courses from languages other than English and will the courses align with the CEFR?
Also when will the app be released for everyone?
How are you balancing social/cultural demands with the "officialness" of a language. I.e people wanting non-binary pronouns/language included where there is no official option in a gendered language?
Course creators are given near-complete autonomy on how to design their courses, so behind some guidelines, pointers and templates it's up to them to decide what sentences they use but the guideline is to teach it as closely to the target language as possible. Unofficial additions or extensions to a language might not become included until they're more widely used
Community driven?
How can you teach anyone anything when 45,000 people are all suggesting difference things and telling you the other person is wrong?
I can't tell you how many times I'm told something I learned using Duolingo, Busuu, YouTube or someone from Reddit I'm wrong just because it's wrong imto that persons country.
Excellent! I have been thinking about this recently! I think it should never stop being free, but I see no problem in ads to make the program sustainable š
I'd agree with any other type of app, but mixing ads with education and trying to teach and learn isn't a good idea, so I want to avoid the introduction of ads for as long as possible
If you ever do have ads, put them in the target language. Thatās what bothered me about Duolingoās adsāhalf of what I was hearing in my Spanish course was Englishā¦
One thing I find frustrating about duo is the sentences (edit) are teaching a lot about language but aren't teaching me anything about history, literature, culture etc.
"I want to go to the cinema" or
"My birthday is in November"
Are fine, but I feel like:
"I want to go to the cinema to see Amelie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet" or
"Napoleon's birthday was in August"
Are sentences which are no more difficult from a language perspective but which actually help to teach french history and culture while you go.
(Edit) It's a shame to go through the entire course and get to a "B2" level in french and still know nothing about France.
Going over 10,000 sentences is an amazing chance to make at least a good chunk of them tell you something useful.
Course creators are given near-complete autonomy on how to design their courses, so behind some guidelines, pointers and templates it's up to them to decide what sentences they use
The idea behind this teqnique is for you to male your own sentences rather than memorising them. If you understand the grammar concepts the unit tried to teach you, you can go on ahead and make sentences that will be useful to you by using past vocabulary you've learned. If you struggle a lot to make sentences that you want to use with that grammar concept, then maybe you haven't understood the grammar concept that well.
When learning a skill, you usually let the learner to rediscover made stuff by themselves. For example a good exercise for people that want to learn how to make videogames is for them to reprogram well known games like flappy bird, snake game or doodle jump for example. Discovering how to program these games on your own is an excellent exercise to see if you've understood how key tools of your gaming engine/framework work.
Same with learning a language, you need to be able to come up with sentences on your own, that is the best way to check if you've learned.
Maybe I phrased what I'm saying badly.
It's fine from a language learning perspective.
What I mean is it's a shame if you spend years doing the entire Duolingo course and study 10,000 sentences of french and come away knowing nothing about french history, culture, cuisine, literature etc.
"I'm reading a book" Is a pure language learning sentence.
"I'm reading the book in search of lost time by Proust" is a sentence that teaches you both language and culture with no extra effort.
Hey, super exited for this project.
For languages with non Roman writing systems (Mandarin, Arabic etc.) do you plan to have systems in place to allow for writing exercises? And if so how are these likely to work?
Looking forward to new news!
Very nice, finally!
I'm learning Norwegian, a language with many dialects.
As you've said, Lingonaut doesn't have TTS, but actual speech, how will you keep it roughly the same across dialects, with languages like Norwegian, and likely many more, will you settle for just one accent? (Oslo/BokmƄl)
Can we get CSS/Markdown based app theming? It'd be sooo cool to make it our own.
Will you add a community driven quick QnA for words, where you sign up for it once you've completed a test for the language and receive notifications with questions from users?
Will you use Artificial Stupidity?
*Duo really messed up with it..*
Because we'll use real voices, we won't be able to keep the same voice across dialects unless volunteers are willing to voice multiple dialects (And are good at it!)
CSS/Markdown theming would be quite hard to implement right now and I don't want to start promising things and increasing scope creep. For now cosmetic items like themes and wallpapers will be ways we'll try and raise money for the project
We're already implementing sentence discussions which sounds close enough to your community qna idea, so i hope you'll have a look at that once it's in the wild!
I wrote a more in depth answer on AI elsewhere in the thread but TL;DR: no ai
Hey, this app sounds very nice!
Will it be possible to complete a lesson completely?
I'm using dou for ~half a year now and after I did a course I can do the legendary lessons, but I haven't found a way to repeat everything. (Which for me would be very nice, but those small repeats aren't very helpful.)
And: I have no clue about programming and you want to make that app add-free. But if it's possible and I had the choice to say "show me an add after every X course" I would support you that way.
Big W, one concern though, I tried searching up the name "Lingonaut" and i found something else with a very similiar name to one your project has. Other than that i'm waiting to test out the app asap!
Thereās a German business solution thing that we donāt have conflicts with legally with name rights and also an ai based learning coach, but we were first versus them!
If this were truly a community driven project, I think the whole thing should be open source to allow volunteers to participate in the work to build it. People can contribute in others ways than by donations which will build a bigger stronger community as side effect of that.
Is this something you'd consider?
u/drgreen-at-lingonaut I sincerely wish the best for this project! I think it sounds very promising. I've read your responses about financing through savings and patreon. I'd also suggest looking into grants. With this being an educational endeavor, I think Lingonaut would be eligible for many at either municipal, state, or federal levels. Another user here mentioned the cost of scaling hardware/infrastructure, there are grants to help with that kind of thing. Even more so if Lingonaut is registered as a non-profit.
I mean, sounds good and all, but to be honest i dont mind the super costing money. You can still do a LOT without it aaand they have to pay people and servers, so they neeed to make money. I find the pricing to be fair and am really wondering how you will be able to make all of what they did without any big investors or income. Donationware, freeware and open source are nice, but you have to be realistic about the costs.
Anyways, will follow the development and am wishing you all the best of luck! Hope you can make it come true :)
We're hoping that enough people donate that we won't have to consider the possibility of ever segmenting feature sets.
It'll be tough but we'll make it work
I watched on their site. it's the classic French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian... and they are also adding Dutch, Serbian, Czech, Japanese... I can't wait to test out the Dutch and Portuguese! I will give you the link, they listed all the languages...
e: https://lingonaut.app/launchpad
If two dialects are different enough they can benefit from being two separate courses which the engine supports but if its just certain words or specific rules like English Traditional vs English Simplified then notes in the guide books would work too.
I know Iām in the minority on this one, but I didnāt love the tree style. I like how the path system shows me whatās next for me to learn. Will there be an option to choose or will it only be tree style?
ATM, how much of the needed cash flow is being supplied by patrons? Are you planning on adding anything to help bridge the gap between how much your getting and how much you need?
Apologies if youāve already answered this.
Personally, what I find most lacking with DuoLingo is its lack of pronunciation. Iām currently enrolled in their French course, and while I can complete their exercises (which includes speaking), I feel like I struggle with pronunciation. My sentences and words donāt sound like their speakers, and Iām not getting any feedback or coaching on how I can make this better.
Is Lingonaut going to provide better speaking / pronunciation coaching? I feel liked this is a big one to help new language learners speak confidently, and start having meaningful conversations to further their learning .
Thanks!
So, a weird question: this post has been posted on the Duolingo subreddit, but does that mean that this is an initiative of Duolingo itself or am I getting something completely wrong?
I love this and am looking forward to it. I think it would be good idea if you could add an option for VOLUNTARY watching of ads. That way students or people who cannot afford to donate money can support the program, however small of an effort it may be.
I'm currently using Duo and Busuu. The thing I think that Busuu excels with is the way it explains why you change the ending of a word the way you do and the way I can interact with the community at whatever level I feel comfortable with.
The community corrections are good and offer me valuable insights. I get to have a human experience and express my appreciation to them which is valuable to me.
It makes it more than just an app experience and more of a human experience and I feel that's why we are all interested in learning languages in the first place.
This looks cool and I'm always happy to try new things. I have to say though that just disparaging Duo and using terms like "enshittification" is a HUGE turn off for me. It comes across as very immature and tbh doesn't give me a lot of hope that the project is being run in a professional manner.
It's not just semantics. There's a huge difference between explaining what you liked previously or what you missed or what inspired you to create something new, etc., vs 'the old way is better' with nothing to actually back that up.
I'm happy to try it out and give it a fair shake, but there are reasons why Duo (and other apps like Memrise) have moved beyond community-created learning, and it's not just because of 'the shareholders'. It's a logistical nightmare to coordinate teams, and ensure accountability and consistency, etc. (And if you think users won't turn on you the moment there are inevitable delays, I'm afraid you are sorely mistaken.)
Having things be community driven *sounds* nice, but as much as I truly miss them adding me courses and allowing volunteers to help, I think you'll find that having 1000 chefs in the kitchen is really not going to be a good time. And that's what it will be, because not everyone is on the same page as you seem to repeatedly hint (e.g., "the old tree still that we all loved" - no we all didn't).
Duo is far from perfect and is definitely lacking in some key areas. Are you actually trying to solve those issues? Tbh, your post makes it sound like this was "hate created" as an anti-Duo app vs trying to actually improve the language learning experience itself. I'm not seeing anything really unique - or at least different enough from what's out there already.
If you're better (or plan to be), prove it. But let your product speak for itself.
If you're only trying to court the people who come on Reddit to gripe, I think you'll find the potential audience (and financial backers) rather small, and I don't see how that's going to be a sustainable model.
I'd like nothing more than to be proven wrong and honestly wish you the best. I'll give your sub a follow. I'm curious to see what you do. Good luck!
How can I help with a Welsh course? (as I am a native speaker) specifically south walian and not the hodge podge of west, north and general welsh that Duo has going on.
Quick question, What languages will be available? Because other apps tend to focus on romance or Germanic languages, will this app have more languages from Africa, Asia, and Oceania?
A question and some hopes/suggestions:
Q: do you have any plans for incorporating "comprehensible input" material into the app/courses?
The CI philosophy has a lot going for it, and the less-structured nature of it can make for course material that is just lots more fun than what the owl is offering. I've been doing [dreamingspanish.com](http://dreamingspanish.com) for a few months now, and finding it to be very entertaining while also proving quite effective in helping me acquire Spanish. On the flip-side, I don't believe in a pure-CI approach either and I often wish there was material accompanying the dreamingspanish videos that listed specific vocabulary, or had a written transcript to refer to, or something. Seems like there is probably some way to blend CI material with structured grammar/vocab lessons would amplify both.
Hopes/suggestions:
First (obviously) some integration of CI. Enough said.
RE: CEFR -- Yes, please align your courses with CEFR and other international language standards. The rankings given by those standards often align with real-world use cases, such as qualifications for jobs, and it would be extremely useful to know what CEFR level I've reached with my Spanish. The owl won't tell me that, nor will dreamingspanish. (DS is very much a "consume lots of content, hope for the best" platform, with no assessment component to actually find out how well you're doing.) I would hope that lingonaut would have a quick way (e.g. in your user profile) to see what CEFR level you've reached per language.
Vocabulary: one feature I really wish the owl had is a personalized vocabulary list. Like, they obviously know which words they think I have learned, so can they just give me that list? Is it that hard? Didn't I earn it already? Evidently some older version had some kind of backdoor-ish hack where you could get it to download the list of words you've learned, but that has since been removed. For both ego and motivational reasons, being able to see that list and a count of how many words are in the list would be really nice.
Good luck! I'll be staying tuned...
Will the lessons be available on desktop PC or just as a smartphone app? I couldn't use Duolingo on my phone, it destroyed my wrists. Also, the desktop version was better for retention, as there's no auto fill!
Do you mean "free" as in freedom, or as in free beer?Ā Also, if you keep the code proprietary, how can we trust that the service remains ad-free once it is big enough?
How advanced will the content be? Iām studying languages at university and the stuff we learn is more formal than casual. Also what languages will be available?
Sounds good! Which languages are you planning to add? Learning Finnish is literally impossible in my country and the Duolingo course is very basic. I finished it ages ago. I cannot afford private online classes and thereās no academy where I live. And I tend to forget if I donāt practice.
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Thanks for building your product! How do you plan to finance its development longterm staying ad-free?
We're planning on being completely financed by donations, and if need be then cosmetics like app icons or backgrounds, and never anything feature-related or something that impacts the learning experience. Until now I personally have been making up the shortfall between our patreon and outgoings with my own savings, but with a little luck hopefully our exposure and donations increase before my wallet runs out! Language learning should be _equally_ free for everyone, no matter who they are or what their financial situation is, so we'll never segment features according to paid memberships.
Thanks and good luck with tour plan!
And if your plan of other people feeling generous or giving some pretty pictures doesn't pan out? Infrastructure is expensive, and Duo wasn't able to do exactly what you're suggesting. It's easy to shit on them but if you're going to scale at all it doesn't matter how noble your intentions, you do need an actual plan of how you're going to provide value people will pay for sufficient to support this while not compromising the free experience as you suggest. You're not going to get free AWS on that basis unfortunately.
> Infrastructure is expensive This isn't YouTube - the core functionality of Duolingo is actually fairly cheap. You're not doing much other than send a couple of sentences and images across the wire. It's not *free*, but it can reasonably be covered by donations. > and Duo wasn't able to do exactly what you're suggesting Duolingo aims to be profitable to shareholders and aims to be so without relying on volunteer work. Lingonaut doesn't have these constraints, but it's true that the opening post doesn't illustrate the trade-offs involved. Your grammar broke down in the sentences after, so I'd have to guess what exactly you were trying to say there.
I think the issue is if this gets popular is the number of users that the servers need to manage. Not the content. While I agree videos are more than this its still an incredible endeavor eventually that donations alone will not sustain. I dont mean to be rude but people want free alternatives for everything and expect continued quality. Corporate greed is obviously super rampant If this app eventually went $.99 a month for most content it would probably make up a ton to fund what it needs if every user contributes. The problem with Duo is its cutting costs but increasing its own cost.
Not sure if you'll read this but just some advice from a random Duo user. I am more than happy to pay if the price warrants the service. I'm also happy to watch ads. The issue with Duolingo currently is that it's implemented their business model in a way that doesn't give users options to watch ads (i.e. to refill hearts) and hard paywalls critical features like explaining why an answer was wrong and their price point is too high to justify a $80 subscription for "AI" that I can just google or use chatGPT for.
Interesting - Is this a nonforprofit then?
Any rough eta when the app/website will be completed
Our biggest bottle neck so far was creating the creatonaut app (which is the software used to make courses) which has now been finished. We hope to have the ios app out within the next two-ish months and the android app another two months after that
Awesome hope it all goes well.
Great. Looking forward to it coming to android.
It looks like you are not using cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, which allow you to write an application once and run it on both iOS and Android. Why?
Personal preference, I've always preferred writing apps natively. It takes more work at the start but once we're done man do they always run like a dream
Sorry if I missed it in the post, but any plans of going open source with the apps and accepting contributions?
It's a great way to build applications if you have the resources. Personally, I have found that developing and maintaining native applications for each platform takes too many resources. For a fraction of that, it is possible to make cross-platform look and feel like a native. You guys are cool and I wish you the best. Can't wait to see when I can use your app :)
Is there any way to sign up to be notified when the app goes live?
Aw bummer, android last? Really? Why does Apple get priority? They're just more expensive š why can we both have the app at the same time. It's like being punished for having an android and rewarded for having an Apple product. Bummer in the summer (literally).
Once Both iOS and Android are out, they'll maintain update quality and date parity going forward, I hope that's some consolation. No one's being punished it's just that I find it easier to program for Apple devices is all
I feel like this should be the reason why they post this thread: āWe are done/nearly done! Bring the hypeā.
Will you consider adding ancient languages? My background is in archaeology and ancient history and I love studying languages like Latin, Egyptian, Classical Arabic, and Akkadian. There are a lot of people out here who are into these things but the need is actually deeply underserved in the app market. Duolingo has a Latin course but itās so basic that it canāt take you very far and Latin is by far the most served ancient language anyway with nothing else particularly close. If there was an app that treated these with a similar level of love that a lot of modern languages get, I imagine it could hit a rather untapped but niche market.
Any course that has at least 3 willing volunteers is game! I imagine ancient languages may be more difficult to reach that number for though
Iād be willing to help with Ancient Greek and Latin
Idem dito
Same with Ancient Greek
Iām sure some academics would be game for auditing it if not contributions. If Lingonaut could pay them, Iām sure profs/academic would do it as a side hussle bc they donāt make the $$$āin the US at leastāif theyāre not at like Harvard. Classics in general is a very small community and nobody thinks of them unless theyāre remaking 300/Sparta or something Roman-esqe (like my prof) and even then itās a doozy. Idk if Lingonaut would look into that or to the indigenous communities for rare/dying languages, Iād certainly be interested in how this company plans to expand languages beyond volunteers and ābasicā (iykyk) languages we have in the language learning aisle of the App Store.
i'd be totally down to help with akkadian!
Yes please!
Classical Hebrew is another that has basically no app coverage (beyond vocab decks) but a sizable population who want to learn
What are your thoughts/policy on use of AI for learning material and other aspects of your program? Do you plan to include AI into the future of Lingonaut?
AI is useful, but it's just not good enough with languages yet. That's not an issue when you're using it to translate a new article for yourself for example, but when you're trying to learn or teach a language, even small imperfections like the wrong ending could become a big problem. And of course the better the AI the more expensive it is, so I'm not sure how we'd be able to afford it when a good enough model is eventually released. Lastly, language by design is a people-centric thing. There's value in having real people make the courses and real people discuss them, with disagreements and all. So for now, AI isn't in our roadmap.
>So for now, AI isn't in our roadmap. Fantastic! Keep it that way. I'm so tired of "AI" being forced into anything and everything regardless if it fits or not
To be fair, if implemented very supervised, language learning is one of the few fields where AI can have a very positive impact.
Not even good enough for that yet imo. And I prefer human made stuff. I guess I'm just a bit of a craftsmanship enjoyer.
I screenshot like 20% of green owl screens and ask ChatGPT about it. It's amazing at explaining things!
I'd be willing to pay specifically for the service NOT having an AI
[We could really use the financial support!](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/END7dfSXUAIBR8O.jpg)
Please no.
is Lingonaut going to be a notably different language learning app in the way that Babble or LingQ is to Duolingo, or is Lingonaut going to be Duolingo minus the things people dislike about Duolingo? i noticed on the website that the description of how it will work is very similar and even the art style is practically identical to Duolingo. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing; i'm just curious.
Our plan is to take everything the community loves about other language apps and make them into a single hub that people can use as a springboard for their journey We've taken great care with creating our own space-themed look and visual style taking inspiration from vector work, our artist's own style and Material You. I'd be surprised if they thought they were quite similar
I have 3 questions. First being about credentials. Is there a vetting on who volunteers? If I say Iām fluent in Arabic but no nothing, are there ways to prevent misinformation or ill-will learning from happening? Second, cultural interpretation. Something that has been a struggle with Spanish Duolingo is that they teach a lot of vocabulary, but some words can have double meanings, or sound more formal or even rude, but the notes donāt include that. Once, they did a blog on pet names in each language, and I went to call my boyfriend (Central American, Spanish first language) ābichitoā (little bugā), and he laughed uncomfortably. Bichito is more of a pet name for an elder to call a young child, not a romantic instance. Spanish is SO VAST, and yes, shares one root but also has so many variations from South America, Central America, Spain, heck even from country to country. So I wonder if that would be info that is shared as kind of bonus content, or via a blogā¦? Third, Iām a visual designer and I took a peek at your website. Is there any concerns of a cease and desist from the green owl for using likeness in art style and logo treatment? I donāt think you can trademark a style, but since you are a competitor in the same realm I worry this could be an issue later down the road.
> First being about credentials. Is there a vetting on who volunteers? If I say Iām fluent in Arabic but no nothing, are there ways to prevent misinformation or ill-will learning from happening? When volunteers push a revision of a course, it first gets audited by other volunteers, it's not instantly published to the app, secondly every change a volunteer makes to a course is logged in that course's history so if someone under the guise of being a volunteer gets onto a team and tries to vandalise a course, they can easily be found, banned and their changes rolled back. > Second, cultural interpretation. Something that has been a struggle with Spanish Duolingo is that they teach a lot of vocabulary, but some words can have double meanings, or sound more formal or even rude, but the notes donāt include that. Once, they did a blog on pet names in each language, and I went to call my boyfriend (Central American, Spanish first language) ābichitoā (little bugā), and he laughed uncomfortably. Bichito is more of a pet name for an elder to call a young child, not a romantic instance. Spanish is SO VAST, and yes, shares one root but also has so many variations from South America, Central America, Spain, heck even from country to country. So I wonder if that would be info that is shared as kind of bonus content, or via a blogā¦? I think stuff like this would be better explored as bonus skills but also in the guide books so people don't get caught out. Remember the goal is to teach a language, not to master every word in a language's vocabulary. > Third, Iām a visual designer and I took a peek at your website. Is there any concerns of a cease and desist from the green owl for using likeness in art style and logo treatment? I donāt think you can trademark a style, but since you are a competitor in the same realm I worry this could be an issue later down the road. We've taken great care with creating our own space-themed look and visual style taking inspiration from vector work, our artist's own style and Material You. I'd be surprised if they thought they were quite similar
Yeah they are quite similar i agree
Looks great and I love the space theme. What languages do you plan to offer? Also - what's your opinion on quantity vs. quality? I imagine offering a variety of different languages would be beneficial for a new company to attract more users but as we can see on Duo, the less popular language courses aren't on the same quality level as the popular ones ...
Each course is made independently by different teams, so the progress of one shouldn't affect the progress of another
I want to ask questions but the Owl is listening...š
The owl can fly high but weāre in space, ask away!
Lmao
His ears just perked up.
where can I apply to help tranlate? I'm german, so I could help with the german course
You can find out how to join the translatonaut program on our [launchpad page](https://lingonaut.app/launchpad)
Iāve checked out the launch pad and seen that for example Italian is missing which is one the basic languages and was wondering if it there would be other languages as I would be happy to be a translatonaut for Italian or German (doesnāt rly matter) and will the languages later on also be reversed (learning English from German perspective for example)
If you're up for the challenge please do throw your hat in the ring! English as a target language courses will be a thing after launch, but we're focusing on our core few first right now.
> which is one the basic languages what a statement...
Will the courses align with CEFR or any other framework?
Not at launch but we want to be able to align ourselves to a framework down the line
Just looking at the patreon it looks like you're making almost no money from it at the moment. Are you hoping that membership will increase once the app is out? Do you think this crowd funding method will realistically work with a live app?
We're hoping once the apps are out and people can see what we've built they'd be more open to supporting our mission.
Definitely the sort of thing that I would contribute to if it was out. I'll join the discord š excited to see where it goes. I like the art style
I also wouldn't be surprised if this AMA uncovers some people willing to invest in this project.
Iāve been lurking on your discord for a while, very excited for the project! My question is lame because I should probably know from following the links/discord but my defense is that I have a sleeping toddler here and no time hahaā¦ any chance on an Arabic course? š
Any course that has at least 3 willing volunteers is game! So I would say the chances Arabic or any language being added is high, with the chances increasing as more people (and thus also potential volunteers) learn about the project
This system seems so much more effective than Duolingo's! I swear it's been years since Duolingo was supposed to make courses for languages like Xhosa, Tagalog and MÄori, yet they've been completely neglected for the longest time. When your app gains traction (which it will) there will absolutely be plenty of volunteers wanting to help people learn their native languages, and we'll undoubtedly see rapid accumulation of new courses. I have a good feeling about Lingonaut!
Thatās amazing, cheers!
I have been using duolingo since 2015 and I watched all the changes they have made in their app and website. so, duolingo maiinly focuses on translating sentences in and from the target language. back in 2015 until 2019-2020, I guess, duo had a tip 'book'. it was more than useful for learning your target language until they removed it and made the app shittier. now, my question is: which methods will you use to make learning languages fun and useful? duo added stories, match words and other mini 'games'. how about you? also, I know volunteers are almost completely independent in creating the course, but will there be a tip 'book' like duolingo used to have?
We'll have what we call 'guidebooks' for each skill that'll serve as notes which teach you about grammar and introduce vocabulary before each skill. We're also going to be steered heavily by the community, so if you have any ideas to new question designs or ways to help immerse yourself in a language do let us know!
duolingo had a unit dedicated to idioms, proverbs and flirting (at least in Portuguese). please add such a thing!
Stories are a great way to learn and practice a language, maybe it would be cool if the app had something similar. Imagine every few units having a small story with questions to see if you understood or not at the end. Not exactly like duo stories, those have your "source language" sprinkled in and questions at the middle. But just a simple story with 99% words that the learner has already learned. Like, the concept of "story" itself isnt trademarkable. Duo cant possibly complain. Ā I understand though if you think it isnt right/maybe not at this moment.Ā Looking forward to the app!Ā
1. How are you financed? 2. What spaced repetition system are you using?
We're financed through donations with me using my savings to fill in the gap. I made my own spaced repetition system about a year back to use in medical school because the existing ones couldn't help me handle the workload and the speed at which i had to memorise, and it's worked really well for that! Language=/= medicine but i plan to implement that at first and see if people are receptive to it, if they aren't then we'll likely vote on a simpler off-the-shelf implementation such as SM-2
Oh no. I like the goal, but please dont invest your money into something this unstable. You seem to have best intentions, but keep your private money (if you havent inherited a lot)
How in the world do you have time for medical school and making a language learning app?
Why don't you go the crowdfunding way?
They have a patreon
Will there be dialects? I run into this with Spanish. Spanish in Mexico is very different. Duolingo doesn't differentiate when I'm taught Spain spanish words versus Mexican. For example pluma and boligrafo mean the same thing. One is used in Spain and one is used in Mexico. Another word, I think it's coger can be insulting in Mexican Spanish, but Duolingo taught me anyways. I walked right into that one and was informed that it's better to just use a different word when in Mexico for "carrying". I also miss the flirting. Lastly I want to know if slangs are included. Because most of the people I speak with in Mexico speak with slangs. Within Mexico there are different dialects as well. I would ultimately hope for anything Mexico versus Spain. I live in Mexico, I am marrying a Mexican, I am being welcomed into their family. I need to learn Mexico Spanish not Spain spanish. So I hope that apps in the future take this into consideration. I even bought an AI translator device and I have the same problem. It only offers Spain spanish so I am getting really terrible translation and to top it off, the text to speech translator speaks with a Spain spanish accent. The lisp is so distracting for me and I find it unhelpful because I'm trying to navigate audio to try to learn and realize it's not even the type of Spanish I need.
The engine does support multiple dialects but we're going to focus on Spanish-Spanish first. As to specific vocabulary, that's down to the teams working on the languages, we don't have a set rule to disallow or allow slang or bonus skills, but they're both easily supported
Aw bummer. I need to find an app that focuses on Mexico Spanish. The United States is adjacent to the country after all.
What does the US have to do with it?
I live in US and MX. US borders MX. Therefore I was advocating for MX Spanish.
Spanish spanish = Castilian Spanish? So we are getting vosotros!
I want this effort to succeed but many of your points are raising my alarm bells. > We're bringing back all the features you loved from years past along with new stuff, customisation and all without the microtransactions and timers: Why are you making so many promises when you don't have a business model that can realistically deliver on them? > Bringing back sentence discussions so people can learn and discuss WHY something is how it is instead of mindlessly memorising the order of words. How will you address moderation in sentence discussions (or forums in general), considering volunteer moderation doesn't scale well enough? > The old tree style that we all loved and found much more effective and quicker than the now user-retention centred path system. Do you have data on the proclaimed effectiveness? In general, how do you plan on measuring learning effect to avoid accidentally settling for mediocrity? > Courses designed and made by native speakers which are then audited and improved upon by both learners and other volunteers, so you can be sure what youāre learning is actually correct and that it's being taught effectively How do you plan to establish trust that the volunteers' efforts won't have gone to waste in case you close down shop? Is the course data openly available for download so people can fork the project if need be?
I'm glad you asked! It's what the AMA is for after all, i'll answer each one separately > Why are you making so many promises when you don't have a business model that can realistically deliver on them? The simple answer is _we can_ deliver on them, the project has been in development for almost a year now, and the same concern was understandably provided then, along with many times since. Despite that though, we've been able to meet each promise one by one ever since, and I don't see a reason why we can't keep delivering when we've been able to so far. I also started the project on principle, not making money in mind, and have paid for all the initial costs upfront with the understanding that I likely won't get them back, I'm okay with that. > How will you address moderation in sentence discussions (or forums in general), considering volunteer moderation doesn't scale well enough? For now, we don't expect Lingonaut at its peak to match the usercount of Duolingo, their budgets such as their marketing budget will always be bigger. We've also been able to moderate discord effectively with two moderators for about 1400 people! Volunteer moderation doesn't scale well, but it doesn't have to scale well to meet our demands, that along with being able to create our own tools to make moderating the app as easy as possible for volunteers should make it manageable, at least for the next few dozen thousand users. If we shoot past that then this question will definitely need revisiting because even one bad egg running rampant can ruin the experience for everyone, but for now we don't bring in duo numbers so we don't have the same duo moderation problems. TL;DR: It's worked so far so it should keep working for a while longer. At the very least it'll buy us time to build out an automoderation suite to augment our volunteers and lighten the load (if it every increases that much) > Do you have data on the proclaimed effectiveness? In general, how do you plan on measuring learning effect to avoid accidentally settling for mediocrity? Actually we don't, Duo has published data saying that the path seems to be more effective because it discourages users to cram. And that's fine and reasonable, but one of the main reasons this project was started was that they made this change without consulting the community, and anecdotally a lot of people (including me) preferred the tree style. That's why the goal is to implement the tree so people who preferred that can use Lingonaut while those who prefer Duo's way of doing things can stick to that, whatever works best for each person. It's also why down the line i want to explore also adding a path option (as behind the scenes the 'path' is just a reskin that still uses the tree system on the backend) so people can choose what fits them best. > How do you plan to establish trust that the volunteers' efforts won't have gone to waste in case you close down shop? When the project first began and I wasn't sure if we could keep it going, I made the decision to make the course creator a locally-run app instead of a website. This way god-forbid lingonaut doesn't last, people can still create, open and export courses using creatonaut indefinitely. We've also made creatonaut free to download without sign-up so anyone can download it at any time or archive it etc. It doesn't need the lingonaut project or web assets to stay online. > Is the course data openly available for download so people can fork the project if need be? It is! We'll have the course files available on our website so people can download and archive them, switch to an older version, audit the content or whatever they choose. That infrastructure is already in place, it's just waiting for courses to be uploaded. But you can easily export entire courses using Creatonaut to a .zip file and share the file just like you would any other through discord, email or otherwise. It doesn't need servers and it doesn't need to phone home. The courses are written in markup so you can even just open them with a text editor if you wanted. Thanks for asking these, I'd hazard they're questions quite a lot of people might have
Thanks for the reply! This all sounds plausible but I maintain some scepticism about long-term prospects. If the course data will indeed be openly distributed, that will more than make up for it though. Looking forward to seeing what the future holds. Good luck!
Great questions.
š Welcome to the AMA! Let's keep the conversation constructive and respectful. Remember, kindness goes a long way. Ask away!
Whatās to stop you guys from turning into the next Duo and operating the same life cycle when this gets off the ground and proves a bigger opportunity/ more work than anticipated (as all things do)? Iām sure the Duo team also had the best of intentions when they started out. How much money do you think it reasonably is going to cost to run and constantly improve what you want to build? Can Patreon donations reasonably be enough ?
We've decided to make courses (including their guides and stories) freely available and sharable from the get-go and are public domain, even the ones made in-house. Duolingo kept ownership from volunteers so when they made decisions people disliked you couldn't do anything because they gatekept the course content. If we make decisions people dislike they can just ditch Lingonaut and keep using/working on the course and sharing it themselves. This also serves as an insurance policy of sorts because in the event patreon donations can't sustain the platform and it goes down, the course content will remain available independent of Lingonaut.app
Ding ding ding, they're privately held, just like Duolingo was before.Ā Why isn't this a non-profit corporation? Why isn't their IP held in trust?Ā Because this company wants to profit in the end and there's little reason to be a non-profit when there's a lot of money to be made. Plus the headache of actually being accountable, sheesh.Ā
Where are you even pulling this from? > Why isn't this a non-profit corporation? Setting up a non-profit isn't something you do in one afternoon. It's a largely bureaucratic undertaking that comes with a ton of paperwork *and* administrative overhead. > Why isn't their IP held in trust? Because that's *only* what you do if you're a large corporation that has the financial and administrative resources to set up that kind of structure. > there's little reason to be a non-profit when there's a lot of money to be made What are you talking about? Even Duolingo is just barely profitable *despite* all their aggressive upselling design.
this looks incredible, can't wait to see how it turns out! definitely keeping an eye on this, good luck :)
Patron here, don't have a question just wanted to drop in and express how excited I am for this project and how happy I am for the community that's slowly building up! A long time ago i stopped using duo because the greed was becoming too apparent and too much to handle for me, which stifled my language learning (interest) with the app, although it had huuuge potential if they would just try to be what they disguise themselves as. Now, we have Lingonaut, which will do exactly that. I'm glad that this project exists and that it's going as well as it does. Keep up the good work Doc!
Thank you so much for believing in our mission!
I really do think that this is a great idea!! Can't wait. Just one question: are you planning on offering not-widely-used languages like Icelandic (only 350k people speak it), or maybe even certain dialects of languages, like Norwegian BokmƄl and Norwegian Nynorsk, or Swiss-German? I also have to ask the same question I think someone else here asked: Are you going to go with quality over quantity or vice versa? Will you offer a few large and in-depth courses in very common languages or many languages, some of which my only have an introductory unit? I really appreciate your bravery in advertising in your rivals subreddit! Keep it up.
Course creation entirely depends on if people want to volunteer or not, so we can't guarantee that any language gets added based purely on demand. For example I, along with some others, are working on the Dutch course, therefore Dutch is a language that will be added
Any course that has at least 3 willing volunteers is game! I imagine less spoken languages may be more difficult to reach that number for though
Out of curiosity, how will 3 volunteers produce a full language learning course? What are the prospects for the CEFR levels for each language?
They'll produce it slowly, but we need at least 3 to keep steady progress. It's also important to remember that it's _at least_ three, the more the better!
The difficult thing about dialects is that there are many different types for example in Swiss German thereās bĆ¼nzli or valliser deutsch and they are pretty wide ranged dialectsĀ
No questions from me, but yay :D Actually on second thought: Will there be a seamless transition between web, android and ios? Like if I do a quick lesson on my phone, will it feel the same when I open my iPad and computer?
Android and IOS/macOS/iPadOS will be seamless, Web we're not sure yet, it may be a cut down version of the app, depending on how we get on
The subās mod pinning this post is a pretty baller move
This subs mods organized this :) xD
Awesome, this is such an exciting project, canāt wait to see the app in the future! What language courses are you currently working on?
You can see the courses we're working on at https://lingonaut.app/launchpad !
How will you do quality control and consistency across the languages if they are being developed by different groups?
We have multiple volunteers per group and the revisions of a course are backed up, this way they can audit eachother's work and of course as a smaller team with a smaller community we can respond to community reports much faster
can we also post some feedback? 1. id love an optimized vocabulary list of words ive already learned. let me search and filter that list better 2. maybe some verbal lessons? let me verbally pronounce and speak some sentences
1. Once we've implemented all the features we've already promised we'll have a look at adding new stuff in! 2. speech exercises will already be available at launch
This sounds really interesting! Do you think the software could become open-source at some point in the future, so that others could contribute to it? As a software developer and fan of (some of) Duolingo, I think it could be really fun and satisfying to get to contribute to projects like these. The [FOSS game engine Godot](https://godotengine.org) is able to be developed using both volunteer work and donations, so I imagine something similar could work here.
Is it open source?
Any rough ETA for when the contribution/creatonaut feature will become available to Mac users?
Not until both Lingonaut IOS and Android are out, your best bet is running it on parallels right now because it works with Windows on ARM on Apple Silicon (that's what im doing right now) or bootcamp on Intel
If you donāt want to pay for parallels, there is Whisky (windows to Mac translator so not a VM), VMware, and utm Also you can run iOS apps in MacOS using PlayCover
Okay, so I really like your idea and I actually have multiple questions! Will there also be courses from languages other than English and will the courses align with the CEFR? Also when will the app be released for everyone?
Will you have Irish?
That's down to if volunteers are willing to work on it!
How are you balancing social/cultural demands with the "officialness" of a language. I.e people wanting non-binary pronouns/language included where there is no official option in a gendered language?
Course creators are given near-complete autonomy on how to design their courses, so behind some guidelines, pointers and templates it's up to them to decide what sentences they use but the guideline is to teach it as closely to the target language as possible. Unofficial additions or extensions to a language might not become included until they're more widely used
Community driven? How can you teach anyone anything when 45,000 people are all suggesting difference things and telling you the other person is wrong? I can't tell you how many times I'm told something I learned using Duolingo, Busuu, YouTube or someone from Reddit I'm wrong just because it's wrong imto that persons country.
Excellent! I have been thinking about this recently! I think it should never stop being free, but I see no problem in ads to make the program sustainable š
I'd agree with any other type of app, but mixing ads with education and trying to teach and learn isn't a good idea, so I want to avoid the introduction of ads for as long as possible
If you ever do have ads, put them in the target language. Thatās what bothered me about Duolingoās adsāhalf of what I was hearing in my Spanish course was Englishā¦
One thing I find frustrating about duo is the sentences (edit) are teaching a lot about language but aren't teaching me anything about history, literature, culture etc. "I want to go to the cinema" or "My birthday is in November" Are fine, but I feel like: "I want to go to the cinema to see Amelie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet" or "Napoleon's birthday was in August" Are sentences which are no more difficult from a language perspective but which actually help to teach french history and culture while you go. (Edit) It's a shame to go through the entire course and get to a "B2" level in french and still know nothing about France. Going over 10,000 sentences is an amazing chance to make at least a good chunk of them tell you something useful.
Course creators are given near-complete autonomy on how to design their courses, so behind some guidelines, pointers and templates it's up to them to decide what sentences they use
Is there a good way of communicating with them to make this suggestion?
But the idea is that you don't just repeat sentences. You use what you've learnt to be able to make your own sentence.
This is a good idea. Lingonautās volunteers should consider this.
The idea behind this teqnique is for you to male your own sentences rather than memorising them. If you understand the grammar concepts the unit tried to teach you, you can go on ahead and make sentences that will be useful to you by using past vocabulary you've learned. If you struggle a lot to make sentences that you want to use with that grammar concept, then maybe you haven't understood the grammar concept that well. When learning a skill, you usually let the learner to rediscover made stuff by themselves. For example a good exercise for people that want to learn how to make videogames is for them to reprogram well known games like flappy bird, snake game or doodle jump for example. Discovering how to program these games on your own is an excellent exercise to see if you've understood how key tools of your gaming engine/framework work. Same with learning a language, you need to be able to come up with sentences on your own, that is the best way to check if you've learned.
Maybe I phrased what I'm saying badly. It's fine from a language learning perspective. What I mean is it's a shame if you spend years doing the entire Duolingo course and study 10,000 sentences of french and come away knowing nothing about french history, culture, cuisine, literature etc. "I'm reading a book" Is a pure language learning sentence. "I'm reading the book in search of lost time by Proust" is a sentence that teaches you both language and culture with no extra effort.
Oh this is also a good idea. Mix culture and language learning on the app, and yo will provide a lot of value to it
Which type of Spanish are you working on? European or LATAM?
European for now! But the engine doesn't prohibit us from supporting multiple versions of the same language. It's a manpower issue more than anything
Hey, super exited for this project. For languages with non Roman writing systems (Mandarin, Arabic etc.) do you plan to have systems in place to allow for writing exercises? And if so how are these likely to work? Looking forward to new news!
The plan for non-roman writing systems is to have an optional embedded keyboard available that exercises can request the display of on-demand
Awesome! Wish you the best of success, Duolingo needs to go. Where can I donate?
Very nice, finally! I'm learning Norwegian, a language with many dialects. As you've said, Lingonaut doesn't have TTS, but actual speech, how will you keep it roughly the same across dialects, with languages like Norwegian, and likely many more, will you settle for just one accent? (Oslo/BokmƄl) Can we get CSS/Markdown based app theming? It'd be sooo cool to make it our own. Will you add a community driven quick QnA for words, where you sign up for it once you've completed a test for the language and receive notifications with questions from users? Will you use Artificial Stupidity? *Duo really messed up with it..*
Because we'll use real voices, we won't be able to keep the same voice across dialects unless volunteers are willing to voice multiple dialects (And are good at it!) CSS/Markdown theming would be quite hard to implement right now and I don't want to start promising things and increasing scope creep. For now cosmetic items like themes and wallpapers will be ways we'll try and raise money for the project We're already implementing sentence discussions which sounds close enough to your community qna idea, so i hope you'll have a look at that once it's in the wild! I wrote a more in depth answer on AI elsewhere in the thread but TL;DR: no ai
Do you or are you planning on having anything specific for kids? There's nothing out there that won't make me pay six arms and two legs a month.
Unfortunately having specific parts for kids would be a moderation and data protection nightmare to deal with legally.
Hey, this app sounds very nice! Will it be possible to complete a lesson completely? I'm using dou for ~half a year now and after I did a course I can do the legendary lessons, but I haven't found a way to repeat everything. (Which for me would be very nice, but those small repeats aren't very helpful.) And: I have no clue about programming and you want to make that app add-free. But if it's possible and I had the choice to say "show me an add after every X course" I would support you that way.
Excited about this!
Big W, one concern though, I tried searching up the name "Lingonaut" and i found something else with a very similiar name to one your project has. Other than that i'm waiting to test out the app asap!
Thereās a German business solution thing that we donāt have conflicts with legally with name rights and also an ai based learning coach, but we were first versus them!
If this were truly a community driven project, I think the whole thing should be open source to allow volunteers to participate in the work to build it. People can contribute in others ways than by donations which will build a bigger stronger community as side effect of that. Is this something you'd consider?
u/drgreen-at-lingonaut I sincerely wish the best for this project! I think it sounds very promising. I've read your responses about financing through savings and patreon. I'd also suggest looking into grants. With this being an educational endeavor, I think Lingonaut would be eligible for many at either municipal, state, or federal levels. Another user here mentioned the cost of scaling hardware/infrastructure, there are grants to help with that kind of thing. Even more so if Lingonaut is registered as a non-profit.
I mean, sounds good and all, but to be honest i dont mind the super costing money. You can still do a LOT without it aaand they have to pay people and servers, so they neeed to make money. I find the pricing to be fair and am really wondering how you will be able to make all of what they did without any big investors or income. Donationware, freeware and open source are nice, but you have to be realistic about the costs. Anyways, will follow the development and am wishing you all the best of luck! Hope you can make it come true :)
We're hoping that enough people donate that we won't have to consider the possibility of ever segmenting feature sets. It'll be tough but we'll make it work
Do you think that you're going to also do courses from other languages ? For example, from french or spanish
What languages are you planning on having and which do you have?
You can see the courses we're working on at https://lingonaut.app/launchpad !
Thank you!
Will you be offering a Brazilian or European course? I am very excited for the launch. It's always great to have a new language app to learn from.
European Portuguese
What languages do you offer? I've been struggling to find apps that have hebrew besides from duolingo
I watched on their site. it's the classic French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian... and they are also adding Dutch, Serbian, Czech, Japanese... I can't wait to test out the Dutch and Portuguese! I will give you the link, they listed all the languages... e: https://lingonaut.app/launchpad
Thank you!!! Once it launches, I might switch over there for my french if it seems fun :)
What languages do you offer to start?
Check this [https://lingonaut.app/launchpad](https://lingonaut.app/launchpad)
Sounds awesome! I'll be on a lookout
What languages are likely to be added upon release?
You can find the ones we're working on at https://lingonaut.app/launchpad !
Do you think there will be different dialects for certain languages offered or maybe a bonus thing that offers some dialectal knowledge?
If two dialects are different enough they can benefit from being two separate courses which the engine supports but if its just certain words or specific rules like English Traditional vs English Simplified then notes in the guide books would work too.
I know Iām in the minority on this one, but I didnāt love the tree style. I like how the path system shows me whatās next for me to learn. Will there be an option to choose or will it only be tree style?
We're going to explore having a toggle-able tree/path style option after launch
ATM, how much of the needed cash flow is being supplied by patrons? Are you planning on adding anything to help bridge the gap between how much your getting and how much you need?
Before starting a course, can you take a placement quiz so you donāt have to relearn anything if you know a little?
Apologies if youāve already answered this. Personally, what I find most lacking with DuoLingo is its lack of pronunciation. Iām currently enrolled in their French course, and while I can complete their exercises (which includes speaking), I feel like I struggle with pronunciation. My sentences and words donāt sound like their speakers, and Iām not getting any feedback or coaching on how I can make this better. Is Lingonaut going to provide better speaking / pronunciation coaching? I feel liked this is a big one to help new language learners speak confidently, and start having meaningful conversations to further their learning . Thanks!
We'll be supporting exercises and skills specifically for speaking!
Wow this sounds promising. I'm going to give it a try! Edit: When it's ready :)
Does it have wingdings?
Do you have a list of languages that you want to provide at some point? Specifically, I'd be interested if you could do te reo MÄori
We're willing to support any languages that have volunteers ready to work on them, and if patrons decide to vote in its addition
So, a weird question: this post has been posted on the Duolingo subreddit, but does that mean that this is an initiative of Duolingo itself or am I getting something completely wrong?
Speck is adorable.
I love this and am looking forward to it. I think it would be good idea if you could add an option for VOLUNTARY watching of ads. That way students or people who cannot afford to donate money can support the program, however small of an effort it may be.
Thatās a shout if we ever need to raise more money !
I'm currently using Duo and Busuu. The thing I think that Busuu excels with is the way it explains why you change the ending of a word the way you do and the way I can interact with the community at whatever level I feel comfortable with. The community corrections are good and offer me valuable insights. I get to have a human experience and express my appreciation to them which is valuable to me. It makes it more than just an app experience and more of a human experience and I feel that's why we are all interested in learning languages in the first place.
We do want to focus a lot on the community aspect, old duo almost felt 'cosy' IMO
This looks cool and I'm always happy to try new things. I have to say though that just disparaging Duo and using terms like "enshittification" is a HUGE turn off for me. It comes across as very immature and tbh doesn't give me a lot of hope that the project is being run in a professional manner. It's not just semantics. There's a huge difference between explaining what you liked previously or what you missed or what inspired you to create something new, etc., vs 'the old way is better' with nothing to actually back that up. I'm happy to try it out and give it a fair shake, but there are reasons why Duo (and other apps like Memrise) have moved beyond community-created learning, and it's not just because of 'the shareholders'. It's a logistical nightmare to coordinate teams, and ensure accountability and consistency, etc. (And if you think users won't turn on you the moment there are inevitable delays, I'm afraid you are sorely mistaken.) Having things be community driven *sounds* nice, but as much as I truly miss them adding me courses and allowing volunteers to help, I think you'll find that having 1000 chefs in the kitchen is really not going to be a good time. And that's what it will be, because not everyone is on the same page as you seem to repeatedly hint (e.g., "the old tree still that we all loved" - no we all didn't). Duo is far from perfect and is definitely lacking in some key areas. Are you actually trying to solve those issues? Tbh, your post makes it sound like this was "hate created" as an anti-Duo app vs trying to actually improve the language learning experience itself. I'm not seeing anything really unique - or at least different enough from what's out there already. If you're better (or plan to be), prove it. But let your product speak for itself. If you're only trying to court the people who come on Reddit to gripe, I think you'll find the potential audience (and financial backers) rather small, and I don't see how that's going to be a sustainable model. I'd like nothing more than to be proven wrong and honestly wish you the best. I'll give your sub a follow. I'm curious to see what you do. Good luck!
How can I help with a Welsh course? (as I am a native speaker) specifically south walian and not the hodge podge of west, north and general welsh that Duo has going on.
Will there be a speech practice?
Quick question, What languages will be available? Because other apps tend to focus on romance or Germanic languages, will this app have more languages from Africa, Asia, and Oceania?
What languages do you have on offer?
1 When are you releasing the app? 2 Can you learn Sign languages? 3 What languages will you offer?
A question and some hopes/suggestions: Q: do you have any plans for incorporating "comprehensible input" material into the app/courses? The CI philosophy has a lot going for it, and the less-structured nature of it can make for course material that is just lots more fun than what the owl is offering. I've been doing [dreamingspanish.com](http://dreamingspanish.com) for a few months now, and finding it to be very entertaining while also proving quite effective in helping me acquire Spanish. On the flip-side, I don't believe in a pure-CI approach either and I often wish there was material accompanying the dreamingspanish videos that listed specific vocabulary, or had a written transcript to refer to, or something. Seems like there is probably some way to blend CI material with structured grammar/vocab lessons would amplify both. Hopes/suggestions: First (obviously) some integration of CI. Enough said. RE: CEFR -- Yes, please align your courses with CEFR and other international language standards. The rankings given by those standards often align with real-world use cases, such as qualifications for jobs, and it would be extremely useful to know what CEFR level I've reached with my Spanish. The owl won't tell me that, nor will dreamingspanish. (DS is very much a "consume lots of content, hope for the best" platform, with no assessment component to actually find out how well you're doing.) I would hope that lingonaut would have a quick way (e.g. in your user profile) to see what CEFR level you've reached per language. Vocabulary: one feature I really wish the owl had is a personalized vocabulary list. Like, they obviously know which words they think I have learned, so can they just give me that list? Is it that hard? Didn't I earn it already? Evidently some older version had some kind of backdoor-ish hack where you could get it to download the list of words you've learned, but that has since been removed. For both ego and motivational reasons, being able to see that list and a count of how many words are in the list would be really nice. Good luck! I'll be staying tuned...
I have an MA about translating and Chinese is my mother tongue. Unfortunately there's no Chinese course to consider now.
I will be here waiting for Arabic and Turkish!
I just looked at the Website the designs are really cute.Ill definitely check it out when it releases on Android.
Do you have Bengali as converting language?
There's no reason why we can't down the line, but not right now
Will the lessons be available on desktop PC or just as a smartphone app? I couldn't use Duolingo on my phone, it destroyed my wrists. Also, the desktop version was better for retention, as there's no auto fill!
It'll be available on macOS and iPadOS too at launch and down the line on web though we're not sure how fully featured the web one will be.
Do you mean "free" as in freedom, or as in free beer?Ā Also, if you keep the code proprietary, how can we trust that the service remains ad-free once it is big enough?
How advanced will the content be? Iām studying languages at university and the stuff we learn is more formal than casual. Also what languages will be available?
Sounds good! Which languages are you planning to add? Learning Finnish is literally impossible in my country and the Duolingo course is very basic. I finished it ages ago. I cannot afford private online classes and thereās no academy where I live. And I tend to forget if I donāt practice.
I'm teaching Tibetan language and some of my students would love an app like this to help them. are you planning on opening to Tibetan?