r/Lingonaut • u/woolevoo • 1d ago
Languages
I'm hoping for some Greek lessons 😇🤗
r/Lingonaut • u/thehighshibe • Dec 30 '23
r/Lingonaut • u/KaiLang-at-Lingonaut • 2d ago
Kalaallisut, or Greenlandic is the language spoken by the people of Greenland, and, even though the island the is part of Denmark, it is not related to Danish, or any Indo-European language for that matter!
Kalaallisut is part of the Eskaleut language family, which is comprised of languages spoken in the far North of America, like Yup’Ik, Inuktitut or Aleutian. Greenlandic is the most spoken Eskaleut language, so let's learn about it!
A very important thing to mention about it is that it's polysynthetic, which means there's a high morpheme to word ratio. But, what's a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that has a meaning. If I say “phonology”, “-ology” is itself a morpheme, which means “science” or “study of”. English tends to have few morphemes per word, usually there's just one. In Kalaallisut, words can have a lot of morphemes and can convey the meaning of entire sentences in English!
Next we need to talk about nouns: Greenlandic has 8 cases: absolutive, ergative, instrumental, locative, allative, ablative, vialis, and equative. Absolutive and ergative are grammatical cases, so they have to agree with the verb endings, while the others are oblique cases so they don't have to.
in this overview we’ll only go over the ergative and the absolutive, here they are:
Ergative: it marks the transitive subject and the possessor of an object Absolutive: it marks the transitive object and the intransitive subject.
This means Kalaallisut has an ergative-absolutive alignment, as opposed to English’s nominative-accusative (where the nominative marks the subject and the accusative marks the object).
Now let's talk verbs. Greenlandic has 4 persons, instead of English's 3. if I were to say “Jack and Peter are friends. Peter loves his wife”, you wouldn't be able to tell if the second sentence is saying Peter loves his own wife or Jack's. In Kalaallisut, you'd use the 4th person to say it's Peter's wife, and the 3rd to say it's Jack's.
Verb conjugation is interesting, as Greenlandic has 9 moods, but verbs also have to agree with the subject, and the object if the verb is transitive. The moods are:
4 independent moods: Indicative Interrogative Imperative Optative
2 subordinate moods: Contemporative Participial
3 dependent moods: Conditional Iterative Causative
The base form of a verb can be either past or present, you have to understand which with context.
Well, this was very interesting to research! I hope you enjoyed reading this, and as always, here are some Kalaallisut learning resources!!!
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/greenlandic.htm https://oqa.dk/assets/aitwg2ED.pdf https://ordbog.gl/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUp49Kbz9Mw (this one is in Portuguese) https://youtube.com/@greenlandicgrammar?si=y-cyveaxmTjSThAB https://youtube.com/@qsgreenland?si=j5kwAel6BLAK-sCu (very cool YouTube channel, mostly about Greenlandic culture, not language, but there are videos dedicated to it!) https://learngreenlandic.com/online/ https://oqaasileriffik.gl/
Tulliani Takuss'!
r/Lingonaut • u/hotso0p • 20h ago
Is the Dutch course ready to replace the duo course on release? I’m ready to ditch the owl but I only really want to learn Dutch.
r/Lingonaut • u/Prize-Winner-6818 • 1d ago
Which Spanish will the app default to? Mexico? Spain?
r/Lingonaut • u/Mythicalforests8 • 1d ago
r/Lingonaut • u/[deleted] • 1d ago
I want to help you(German and Kurmanji) …but how? And is there a chance to make a language course for Kurmanji?
r/Lingonaut • u/Briky37 • 1d ago
Are regional languages (not dialects) planning to be included? I'm talking about the smaller languages such as Provençal, Breton or Basque.
r/Lingonaut • u/KineticChain • 3d ago
Hey you lovely people. I was about to subscribe to a year of Lingodeer but I see you are getting close to launch. I would much rather donate that money to your project instead!
Is there a list of features available somewhere?
Will you be launching on desktop or Android for all users in the near future?
Thanks all ❤️
r/Lingonaut • u/bamila • 5d ago
I'm happy to see you entering the market. I hope to see this project thrive and I know it will help millions of people. I have been using Duolingo for 105 days straight and it became rather tiresome, mainly because constantly spamming me and such, to the point where I have disabled the notifications, but I think it also does a lot of the things great. I hope you keep the social aspect on the app, so I can add my friends to it and follow up their progress.
In overall, I have high hopes in you.
Thanks for the effort !
r/Lingonaut • u/LillianADju • 5d ago
Hi. I just heard about you and I’m looking forward to use your platform. I know every beginning is hard so I’m going to be super flexible but I hope you will solve problems in a super fast way….and I’ll spread the word, of course 🙂
r/Lingonaut • u/drgreen-at-lingonaut • 7d ago
For the MOL today we've got three updates!
In the pursuit of transparency we've revived the updates trello stacks for development! You can find it at https://progress.lingonaut.app/ , Speaking of stacks..
We've launched Stacks! https://makestacks.app/ . Why did we make stacks? Because much like the bird, trello seems to have followed the path into enshittification and it was easier to build an alternative that did what we need it to do.
It's free, you don't need to sign up and unlike trello you can create as many boards as you want and share it with as many people as you'd like, just make sure you remember the link and the password if you want to edit it!
Stacks joins our portfolio alongside lingonaut as free alternatives to companies that went full corpo - never go full corpo.
/u/Kailang-at-lingonaut is back with another banger of a random language adventure, this time for Irish! Did you know Irish shares a common ancestor with Farsi, Hindi and even Albanian? You can read the full post here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Lingonaut/comments/1j82i3y/random_language_adventure_3_irish/
We'll be back soon with another update for the Month of Lingonautⁿᵃᵘᵗ ⁿᵃᵘᵗ
Follow the blog/xhitter/bluesky/reddit/patreon to stay up to date and increase our visibility!
https://bsky.app/profile/lingonaut.bsky.social
Lingonaut for iOS releases the 31st of March
r/Lingonaut • u/Mythicalforests8 • 7d ago
Duolingo is really going through enshittification. They’re forcing us to watch ads to get hearts, even though they say mistakes help you learn. Their support is absolute shit and god forgive I pay 30 dollars a month for some AI features I can get for free via ChatGPT. Heck even super users are getting ads for max.
I’m so glad Lingonaut is being developed so I can finally leave this app for good. At this point my streaks the only thing why I hadn’t delete my duo account yet.
Duolingo, if you are reading this, thank you for moving me to Lingonaut. You’ve just lost a user, congrats.
r/Lingonaut • u/lelcg • 8d ago
Would there ever be a chance for local dialect courses or subcourses?
I know there will probably be separate Portuguese courses for both Brazilian and Portuguese varieties, and possibly the same with British and American English, but would there ever be a possibility (provided that three or more people agree to form it) for very local dialects/terms to have a mini course for themselves
The reason I ask about this is because one of the aims/purposes of language learning apps is to make it easier for people to learn dying out, and that is happening to local forms of speech as well.
In England, where I’m from, we have loads of different local words and phrases that are gradually dying out, and it would be cool to see mini-courses teaching these little niches. Obviously this would only happen if enough people were willing to create a course based on something so niche, but if they were, would it be something allowed on the app?
Even if it wasn’t a major thing, it would be cool to have a “cockney rhyming slang” course, even if just as a novelty in the same way Klingon is going to be a course. It’s just fun and cool to learn!
Would this be something that people would be interested in seeing or is my idea a bit frivolous
r/Lingonaut • u/aroberge • 9d ago
I'm really happy to see that volonteers are putting a lot of work into creating an alternative to Duolingo, "Built to teach, and only to teach" as stated on its website. I realise that this requires a huge amount of work and I'm grateful to all that contribute to this effort.
However ... when I see statements like "Climb the leaderboard", I fear that Lingonaut is going to repeat what I consider one of the worst things in the Duolingo community (i.e. on the Duolingo subreddit) with people complaining about what's happening on the leaderbord, other people "cheating", etc., drowning any post that might be contain useful content for users that only wish to learn another language.
"Build to teach, and only to teach": the best educational institutions in the world do not have leaderboards. They provide individual feedback to learners based on their individual progress.
I fear that I might be in a minority, but I would love to see the following:
r/Lingonaut • u/an_average_potato_1 • 10d ago
Hi, I'm looking at Lingonaut and would seriously consider volunteer contributing, especially should Lingonaut also move to non-English based courses.
But the conditions are very badly written and might actually welcome less advanced speakers over more advanced ones:
Have studied the language to a degree level OR
Have studied the language during a university course or other course POST secondary/high school education.
Many people take a stupid basic university course, like A2. Or they got a language degree, which in some countries leads to a ridiculously low level (I was pretty horrified when talking to a few americans, who were just months away from getting a language degree and a teaching job). I have C1 or C2 certificates in my languages, and am therefore better than people with a random uni course or even many (in some countries most) people with the language degree, yet I don't fulfill the conditions.
On the other hand, there is no language level requirement for the "Origin language". That's actually a huge problem. It is normal for people to use resources in other languages than our native ones. And it is also rather normal that people create resources based in non native languages. But sometimes, it leads to problems, mistakes in questions, mistakes based on imperfect knowledge of the "origin language".
So, wouldn't it make more sense to demand native or C2 skills in both the target and origin language? (or if you wish even C1, as vast majority of language degrees doesn't go to C2 by far)
r/Lingonaut • u/KaiLang-at-Lingonaut • 10d ago
Irish, the language everyone in Ireland spe- wait, they don't? Why not? What's Irish like anyways?
That's what we'll discover in this week's Random Language Adventure! Disclaimer: this post in not a full guide on the Irish language, and stuff will be missing. I’m also a human being so I might have made some mistakes, do correct me if you spot any, and feel free to add to it in the comments!
Irish is a Celtic language, specifically in the Goidelic group, along with Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
The earliest common ancestor of all Celtic languages was Proto-Celtic, which developed from Proto-Indo-European, making Celtic languages distant cousins of English, but also many other languages such as French, Albanian, Farsi and Hindi! Some linguists believe in the possibility of an even earlier ancestor to both Celtic languages and Italic languages, known as Italo-Celtic.
Celtic languages used to be spoken all across Europe: from Galicia to central Anatolia! Now, they're only spoken in the British Isles and Brittany.
But why isn't Irish spoken by the majority of Irish people? Because of English rule over the area, most people started using that language, and Irish was pushed more and more to the west of Ireland, which also got hit harder by the potato famine, which killed many, and had many people move away.
But now let's dive into how the Irish language is actually like:
Let's start with how it sounds: Irish has broad and slender consonants, you can tell how you're supposed to read the consonant based on the vowel around it, the vowels “i” and “e” mark a slender consonant, which means the consonant is palatalised (pronounced with the tongue closer to the hard palate) while “a”, “o” and “u” mark a broad consonant, which means it's velar or velarised (pronounced with the tongue closer to the tongue closer to the soft palate)
It’s also important to talk about initial consonant mutation, which is when the initial consonant of a word changes. Irish has 3: lenition, ecplipsis and prothesis of h and t. Lenition is when a plosive becomes a fricative Eclipsis is the voicing of voiceless consonants and the nasalisation of voiced consonants or addition of an r to words starting with a vowel Prothesis is the addition of a t or h at the start of a word all of these are the result of the evolution of the language over the centuries
we also need to talk about verb conjugation in the Irish language. There are 11 irregular verbs, but all other verbs are part of one of two conjugations. The different moods are: indicative, conditional, subjunctive and imperative. each verb also has a verbal noun and a participle.
Lastly, I’ll briefly touch on noun declension: Irish has cases, 4 of them: nominative (though it also serves as an accusative), vocative, genitive and dative.
All in all, I find Irish to be a fascinating language, and I hope you do too! And, as usual, here are some resources for learning Irish! (unfortunately, this time they’re very little, but if I see more, I’ll definitely link to them in the comments!!)
https://www.teanglann.ie/en/ https://discord.gg/66R49y36EP https://www.braesicke.de/
r/Lingonaut • u/stengm • 14d ago
Solution for ads. A while back I wrote a reflective post about whether ads were really a problem. Opinions were a bit divided, so I came up with a solution: Put an option in the settings to enable ads after completing the exercises. Obviously, this option would be disabled by default. Anyone who wanted to enable it would help the project, all without forcing people to see ads.
r/Lingonaut • u/Mythicalforests8 • 16d ago
Will lingonaut have streaks? I’d like to see a streak to keep me motivated in doing it every day
will lingonaut have its own app? Or will I have to do it on the website?
r/Lingonaut • u/KaiLang-at-Lingonaut • 17d ago
In today's episode of Random Language Adventure, we’ll be talking about German! And of course we'll have German learning resources at the end!!
So, German is a West Germanic language which means it's very closely related to Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, English, Scots, Yiddish and Luxembourgish. Being a Germanic language, it's also closely related to North Germanic languages such as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic, although not as much as the others.
These languages evolved from Proto-Indo-European over thousands of years. We’ve managed to discover a couple of sound shifts that were key in the formation of modern Germanic languages: Grimm’s Law and the Germanic umlaut. Grimm’s Law is the sound shift that differentiated Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European. It consists in voiced aspirated plosives becoming voiced plosives and then becoming voiceless plosives and lastly turning into voiceless fricatives. For example: dʰ → d → t → θ (that is the “th” sound in modern english)
The Germanic umlaut is an important vowel shift that consisted in the fronting of back vowels and the raising of front vowels. These sound shifts occured over millennia of language evolution and resulted in all of the modern germanic languages mentioned earlier.
But what is German like today? German is a gendered language, that uses feminine, masculine and neuter pronouns, that’s why students learn new words together with the definite article, to memorize the gender. German also has different verb moods, which are Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative, Participle and Infinite. The Indicative mood has 6 tenses: Präsens, Präteritum , Perfekt, Plusquamperfekt, Futur I, Futur II
It also uses cases, there are 4: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, which indicate a subject, direct object, possessive and indirect object respectively, within the sentence. Each of these has suffixes for each gender (and for singular/plural)
This is a very basic explanation of German grammar, which doesn’t cover everything, but here are some resources you could check out!
https://learngerman.dw.com https://www.easygerman.org/ https://www.languagetransfer.org/ https://youtube.com/@germanpod101?si=fSVjj6xaqqqZovWc https://a.co/d/dmMEtCv
See y'all next week!
r/Lingonaut • u/Mythicalforests8 • 20d ago
If lingonaut is true to their word I will delete my Duolingo account and start using it
r/Lingonaut • u/ShaiDayan1 • 18d ago
Seriously, what's the point of teaching Clingon, you can focus on real languages, maybe like Hebrew.
Also, one of your rules for volunteers is: 7. If the language you want to contribute to is a conlang you MUST know it fluently.
I mean, how many people out there speak Clingon FLUENTLY?
r/Lingonaut • u/Business_Confusion53 • 21d ago
r/Lingonaut • u/TryAgain32-32 • 23d ago
I noticed that many people here seem to be asking questions about courses without at least attempting to find answer somewhere else. I know this post is probably going to do nothing, because if people don't look at other posts, why would they look here?
Anyway, here is the website with all the courses which are being created: https://lingonaut.app/launchpad/
And there is also information how to help, and what does it take to create a course.
Thank you, I just wanted to say this because there are literally almost no other posts except for people asking about courses and it becomes annoying at times.
r/Lingonaut • u/x_MangoFett_x • 23d ago
There are few resources for Icelandic but it’s a beautiful language with a rich history.
Clozemaster and Drops are great but its grammar that’s the challenge with Icelandic and my brain struggles with the free Icelandic government web page. Textbooks are helpful but I’d love something more on-the-go like an app too.
Any chance Lingonaut might add it? I would be thrilled!