Duolingo please add Farsi

[asatilloye]

Duolingo please add Farsi

[Thomas.Heiss]

Hello,

see the red headline above.

See my other replies in the other request threads.

Realistically spoken, it won't be happening anytime soon.

There have been multiple requests / threads / up-votes for Farsi and others on the old Duolingo (community) discussion forum where a global index- and single language request threads existed previously.

Duolingo staff once said that they will have to be focusing on the current courses (e.g. English) and to develop them further, which makes a lot of sense.

[Thomas.Heiss]

Many courses have been abandoned for years and had a high user reports backlog queue or are not yet aligned with CEFR and are so much shorter.

DL staff have even postponed their original plan in adding new C1-C2 levels to the French and Spanish courses and will be focusing now/first to bring other current language courses up (German is B1, Italian is getting rearranged for CEFR).

Note: The volunteer contributor program has ended several years ago.

Even when contributors would have previously added Farsi for FREE, it was NOT accepted by Duolingo staff.

Now they will likely only invest into new languages (maybe in the farer future) if there is a high enough demand (millions of ACTIVE learners) and if this can bring in new paying Super/Max subscribers.

We're talking about millions of learners, not only a few thousands.

..(...)..

To do this they would first need to hire professional course designers/contractors and invest a significant amount of $$$.

Instead of they cut back in contractor numbers last year and have not extended existing contractors; several of them applied previously and were assigned to existing courses (now replaced by AI for course creation).

Shareholders and investors likely don't want to see any red numbers and much more (new) expenses but are now more interested in seeing real revenue from paying users (from current available courses) for a positive result.

Personally I don't see it happening soon or ever on behalf of their professional program.

There are enough new bothering features implemented for the worse (e.g. hearts, no chance to practice, to easily refill hearts) that DL staff will be driving away a lot of its free user basis.

[Thomas.Heiss]

In my humble opinion you hardly can learn a new language from scratch exclusively with Duolingo if it's very different from your own language, the same language group or from the writing system.

Portuguese and French are difficult enough for me where these two are placed by Fsi in the easy category I) table.

Thankfully I can read all words (or make some good guesses) as it's the same Latin letter system like my German native language and I only need to learn the different accents/diacritics and how to pronounce the words / letters (only the changes, e.g. Spanish vs Portuguese) and how to apply the learned grammar with the word banks by tapping or with free writing exercises.

With the quite limited didactical tutor approach chosen by Duolingo (translations back and forth, learning new words only by using hints) and removed old Web Tips&Notes and old mobile tips on the path UI:

It would be a real nightmare for me A) having to learn a very different writing system and B) having to start to learn a new language here totally from scratch without C) relying on any similarities or D) the two languages (or three with English, four with PT/FR) not sharing a higher lexical factor (like Germanic- and Romance languages).

For example (for French):
Without having learned Brazilian Portuguese for five years before starting with French (A1, from zero) on Busuu and being able see the big grammar picture:

I would find it much harder to freshly start on Duolingo (as a beginner) without any formal lesson notes / good tutor explanations and without my current Romance grammar knowledge (the two are a bit similar, still different enough).
For French I can at least add the cached WebT&N / mobile tips from two volunteer courses to my reading list without having to immediately buy an external grammar book, but only because I'm not a newbie on Duolingo and we have some links of old documentation content here.

And now try to multiply all these learning hours with a much higher difficulty factor (e.g. 3.67x) for other category III-IV) languages.
I don't even want to do this interesting math based on EN/FR/PT which only can show me how much I constantly would be lagging behind a faster required learning process in the more difficult or superhard language.

Later you'll also need to add your "personal self study" factor (PF):

We usually don't learn as fast in our home environment (where we need to figure it out all by ourselves) when we are not enrolled into a classroom for multiple hours per day like FSI and DLI students do it.
So a higher (3.5)4.0-6.5+ factor shall be assumed (as for PT or FR I feel I'm already way above the one smaller 2.5/3.0 factor number) for pure self studying; I don't have fully started with FULL immersion for Brazilian Portuguese after sp many years, not yet

Even these talented students, being able to profit so well from additional teacher drills and group exercises, have to add additional homework hours to make some good progress towards the S3/R3 proficiency levels!

..(...)..

At least you need a good headstart from other resources.
To know more about the language basics.

Even for our Portuguese Ex-volunteer course the coursebooks for the path units are now mainly empty and only show example sentences.

Before there were more usable infos given - and don't forget the removed sentence discussions.
Now I hardly want to continue with my DE->FR course because of this big issue (missing SDs); staff basically killed ALL existing detail explanations from Ex course moderators and other advanced learners. What a crap and nonsense is this?!

Imagine this for a very different language (different group, other category III-IV) table, no prior knowledge).

I can only imagine that many people will quickly have to give up after the first few lessons with no good instructions and proper audio spoken by native speakers (TTS alone is not enough).

And if they don't: Their enthusiasm in the new language is quickly defeated by constant course changes / incompatible updates (I read all the forum complaints by users when staff started to add their new French CEFR course), reset course progress, jumping your account back or forth on the path UI with each new course update so you clearly have no clue where you've been last time, what NEW words you might have missed learning,..