erinja:This isn't the first such request we've had in the forums, though the other one was worded a bit more like "Someone make a Duolingo course so I can learn Esperanto there".

Fluent speakers are in demand in the Esperanto world. We hear a lot of "It would be great if someone could ...! Unfortunately, I don't have the language level to do it, so can someone else do it?" Most fluent speakers don't have time for putting work into a large project that someone else is enthusiastic about. My general response is "If you are enthusiastic about it and your language level isn't sufficient to it, then maybe you should increase your language level"

Esperanto isn't that hard. If you're really enthusiastic about Duolingo, perhaps you could learn Esperanto first, and then help out with building a course at Duolingo. Building a course is a lot of work, and since you have a lot of enthusiasm for it, this would be a great incentive for putting some work into your Esperanto, so you can contribute in a meaningful way.

Like I said, they only need two or three dedicated people. I'm not asking for everyone to put their lives down, I'm just seeing if anyone out there is interested.

I would love to be a part of building something on Duolingo, but thinking I could gain enough fluency in Esperanto to build an entire course to teach it to other people isn't reasonable, and at that point they'll have picked other people for the job long before I got to the sufficient level.

Wow. I wasn't really expecting this much negativity on here.

jismith1989:

Rejsi:

jismith1989:Anyone who allows others to monetize their language learning (worse, on a course not even developed by said others, or people paid by said others) is an idiot. Unfortunately, the world does not have a shortage of idiots.

Lernu seems like a good enough model for learning Esperanto to me.

Er...Duolingo is a free site. They probably profit from ads, but whatever. If you take issue with that then I don't know what to say.

Their about page says that they are free and will always be free because during the course of your learning you translate documents that people pay Duolingo to have translated. So you're doing free work for them while you learn, and receiving none of the profit (except if you count learning a language as profit, but you'd be doing that on any course). That's probably the main reason why they're not so keen on setting up an Esperanto site, because they won't really be able to profit from it. As Rikat says, I don't want to 'create value' for a handful of owners when there are all kinds of other very good ways to learn a language that don't involve you providing free labour.

There's a saying that relates to these kind of Internet start-ups, that if you're not paying for something, then the product is you! (See here, for example.) This is just an extreme example of that.

Yes, that is their business model, but the creator of the site Luis Von Ahn, actually resents people thinking they're just there for profit. Part of their goal is to provide free worldwide foreign language education, and they have blatantly stated that they would even love for people to build courses for dying out languages to help preserve them. It's not all about profit.

The Esperanto course hasn't gotten moving yet because MOST courses haven't gotten moving; they're slowly developing the system for people to build courses and they don't want to rush everything for risk of the whole system being a mess, but courses to teach languages other than the six they already have will start opening around the beginning of March.

Their goal is to provide free language learning to the world in a format accessible to as many people as possible. Far from making people idiots to use it, I want to support them in every way I can.

I started learning Esperanto because I thought it would be a chance to meet a bunch of positive-minded people, but after this kind of feedback, I really don't think this is the site for me.

Rejsi:

erinja:This isn't the first such request we've had in the forums, though the other one was worded a bit more like "Someone make a Duolingo course so I can learn Esperanto there".

Fluent speakers are in demand in the Esperanto world. We hear a lot of "It would be great if someone could ...! Unfortunately, I don't have the language level to do it, so can someone else do it?" Most fluent speakers don't have time for putting work into a large project that someone else is enthusiastic about. My general response is "If you are enthusiastic about it and your language level isn't sufficient to it, then maybe you should increase your language level"

Esperanto isn't that hard. If you're really enthusiastic about Duolingo, perhaps you could learn Esperanto first, and then help out with building a course at Duolingo. Building a course is a lot of work, and since you have a lot of enthusiasm for it, this would be a great incentive for putting some work into your Esperanto, so you can contribute in a meaningful way.

Erinja, I don't think that Kristoforo3 not knowing enough Esperanto is the real issue here. I and many others actually signed up for Duolingo's project months ago...but they still haven't started. I got an email that said "we'll get back to you in a few weeks," and they never sent a follow up email. It seems like they don't want to start the project unless there is an extraordinary amount of people volunteering. So it doesn't matter what your level of Esperanto is at the moment...no one can contribute.

Thanks for this, I'm happy to know some people have signed up. The incubator is moving a bit slower than they expected, but courses for new languages will start becoming available in March. They're also only rolling out about one new course a week for development; the Duolingo staff has to work closely with the course contributors to make sure everything works out right. So it might be a bit, but Esperanto will definitely be developed. They had a picture when they first hinted at the incubator with a bunch of flags from different countries, and the flag for Esperanto was in front, I think as a symbol of global communication.

Anyways, thanks again. I'm good just knowing some people applied.

Kristoforo3:

Thanks for this, I'm happy to know some people have signed up. The incubator is moving a bit slower than they expected, but courses for new languages will start becoming available in March. They're also only rolling out about one new course a week for development; the Duolingo staff has to work closely with the course contributors to make sure everything works out right. So it might be a bit, but Esperanto will definitely be developed. They had a picture when they first hinted at the incubator with a bunch of flags from different countries, and the flag for Esperanto was in front, I think as a symbol of global communication.

Anyways, thanks again. I'm good just knowing some people applied.

We'll here's why I'm so skeptical. This is a copy of an email they sent me in October. This is when the entire incubator project was new.

Hi,

We’re excited for your interest in participating in this monumental project, and we wanted to give you an update on our progress. We’ve received thousands of applications, and today we started accepting a small number of moderators in a few select languages. We plan to get back to you over the next few weeks as we gradually add more languages, moderators and contributors.

Our plan is to ramp up slowly so that we can make sure we get this just right.

Thank you for all of your support and patience!

Best,
The Duolingo Team
Incubator.Duolingo.com

It's February and I never received another email from them. Meanwhile they've already started many other languages.

I don't doubt they have enough volunteers, but they don't seem to be doing anything with them.

Rejsi:

It's February and I never received another email from them. Meanwhile they've already started many other languages.

I don't doubt they have enough volunteers, but they don't seem to be doing anything with them.

Here's part of an update a month ago from Luis about why courses are added slowly:

Careful growth. We have received over 20,000 applications to contribute to different courses. Because we didn't want any low-quality courses, we decided early on that we would add courses slowly at first, and also be very selective with the moderators. The incubator was launched about 11 weeks ago, and so far we've added 11 courses, so we're adding about one course per week. If you applied to moderate a course that we haven't added yet, hang tight because we may be calling on you soon!

http://www.duolingo.com/comment/1377701

And here's part of a FAQ he answered a week ago about new languages being offered:

When will the reverse courses (from English) be started? In about 4 weeks.

Why is that taking so long? Because in order to do this, we need to build a whole infrastructure to let the mods fully edit their courses. That means giving them the tools to decide which words are in which lessons, which skills come before others, and which words are related to each other. For example, after a certain point in the tree Duolingo needs to know that you understand verb conjugation well enough that when it teaches you the first person form of a regular verb you can also understand the second person. In order to do this, our system needs to know that two different words are both forms of the same verb for any language that we teach. We also need speech synthesizers and voice recognizers. Our Incubator team is working late nights to be able to deliver this as soon as possible.

http://www.duolingo.com/comment/1627314

Yes, they're taking longer than expected, but they're getting there.

Well it would've been nice to have at least one update email. I feel like they just deleted my application.

Kristoforo3:Wow. I wasn't really expecting this much negativity on here.

Yes, that is their business model, but the creator of the site Luis Von Ahn, actually resents people thinking they're just there for profit. Part of their goal is to provide free worldwide foreign language education, and they have blatantly stated that they would even love for people to build courses for dying out languages to help preserve them. It's not all about profit.

I started learning Esperanto because I thought it would be a chance to meet a bunch of positive-minded people, but after this kind of feedback, I really don't think this is the site for me.

Yes, I'm sure he does resent it, but he shouldn't. Any business is basically all about profit; if it isn't, it'll soon be beaten into the ground by a competitor that is. That's the nature of the global economy. I'm sure there are all kinds of glorious aims for making the world a better place, just as all these start-ups have, and I don't habour any negative feeling towards Luis Von Ahn, I'm sure, whoever he is, he's a good guy, it's just not a model that I'm happy with. I know that many people are happy to use similar sites though, so I don't see why the site won't do well. All in all, I don't think there has been 'much negativity on here', most of the posts apart from mine were pretty positive!

By the way, I don't know if you have any affiliation to the company, but from your five postings here, I would assume that you may well. If you do, I think it's fair that you let us know, just as a full-disclosure thing. If not, that's fine.

And you're right, I'm not a mindless techno-optimist who sees any criticism as 'negativity'. I don't spend my time spouting quotes from Dale Carnegie and other inspirational thinkers. You're right, I try to be nice and courteous and generally happy, but false positivity is anathema to me. When I see something I happen to disagree with, I say it openly, I don't pretend to think otherwise for the sake of positivity. Don't worry about that putting you off Lernu though, I don't use these forums much either.

jismith1989:Yes, I'm sure he does resent it, but he shouldn't. Any business is basically all about profit; if it isn't, it'll soon be beaten into the ground by a competitor that is. That's the nature of the global economy. I'm sure there are all kinds of glorious aims for making the world a better place, just as all these start-ups have, and I don't habour any negative feeling towards Luis Von Ahn, I'm sure, whoever he is, he's a good guy, it's just not a model that I'm happy with. I know that many people are happy to use similar sites though, so I don't see why the site won't do well. All in all, I don't think there has been 'much negativity on here', most of the posts apart from mine were pretty positive!

By the way, I don't know if you have any affiliation to the company, but from your five postings here, I would assume that you may well. If you do, I think it's fair that you let us know, just as a full-disclosure thing. If not, that's fine.

And you're right, I'm not a mindless techno-optimist who sees any criticism as 'negativity'. I don't spend my time spouting quotes from Dale Carnegie and other inspirational thinkers. You're right, I try to be nice and courteous and generally happy, but false positivity is anathema to me. When I see something I happen to disagree with, I say it openly, I don't pretend to think otherwise for the sake of positivity. Don't worry about that putting you off Lernu though, I don't use these forums much either.

It's a business model that provides free language education and they get paid by news sites and sites like Buzzfeed to provide it to users. It's big companies paying for the average person to learn a language. I'm baffled as to why people think there's something problematic or morally ambiguous with that.

I don't have any affiliation. I find it strange that you think I do.

"I'm not a mindless techno-optimist who sees any criticism as 'negativity'." I don't even know what this means. It doesn't count as a criticism when people are just spouting things off about something or someone they don't know anything about; that's just negativity. And I'm optimistic because it's a brilliant business model and they base everything they do on the site on their research into its effectiveness. It's optimism inspired by their intelligent approach. But I feel like I just got rebuffed by a bunch of jaded hipsters. I'm just gonna wait for the Duo course to come out; I'll learn a lot more on there than I ever would here.

Rejsi:Well it would've been nice to have at least one update email. I feel like they just deleted my application.

I can guarantee you it's not deleted; it's just sitting in a pile of about 20,000 other applications for them to sort through when they're ready for those courses.

Wow, we are hipsters here? I'm sure some of our users would be astonished to learn this.

Personally I think that Duolingo is great fun. But people have all kinds of different ideas about how much they do and don't want others to profit from their work and I guess I don't have a problem with them expressing that.

Unfortunately it looks like you might have to wait a long time to learn Esperanto with Duolingo. If you don't like our site maybe you can learn with kurso.com.br. It's downloadable and there is no forum in it, so there is no pesky community to get on your nerves.