Hey everyone,

I'm not really active on this site, haven't signed on in ages, but I would absolutely love to learn Esperanto. Duolingo is my preferred language site, and I think they're going to do some amazing things. Before, they were only open to teaching six European languages, but they recently opened up applications for people to help build courses for ANY language combination, and one of the courses I would most love to be built is Esperanto for English speakers. So I wanted to come here to see if there's anyone fluent in Esperanto that would be willing to apply. They need people who are fluent in both the language being taught and the language of the speakers they're teaching, and it takes a lot of work, but they only need a few qualified people.

The page for language courses Duolingo is currently developing is here: incubator.duolingo.com
And the page to apply to help build a course is here: http://incubator.duolingo.com/apply

So if you are able and willing, please apply! Or forward the message to people who you think would be good for the job!

Dankon,
Kristoforo

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: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"

I agree with you, Erinja. And it's my situation. I intend to improve my Esperanto to work on more projects.

I like the Duolingo method. And an Esperanto course there will increase the visibility of Esperanto.

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.

Wow what a great website,

I'm sure if we keep it up the Incubator will include Esperanto
http://incubator.duolingo.com/apply

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.

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.

Rejsi: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.

They are probably hoping to follow in the footsteps of Geocities, Twitter, Facebook etc., first provide a free service to attract thousands of volunteer content creators, and then get rich either by doing an IPO or by selling to a larger company. According to Wikipedia Duolingo has accepted some investments from venture capitalists, so there must be some sort of a plan to turn the volunteer content creators' work into large profits for the handful of owners.

Volunteer content results definitely should remain public domain work (Creative commons). Facilities should excists which enables to make community backups of volunteer content units.

Furthermore there should be out many tools for teacher which support to 'wrap' content to learn. Okay, most of that software is not freeware. But there excists some freeware goodies i.e. Halfbaked Hot Potatoes and Qandary.

Please list other software of that category, too.

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.