Fòram na Gàidhlig

I recently started using Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish, and to prepare for elementary French classes in the fall, and I was wondering if any of the more advanced speakers here had ever considered contributing to a possible Duolingo course on Scottish Gaelic? The thing I like about DL is the fact that it's free, and it would get more Gaelic out there and give people access to it who would not be able to otherwise.

Just a thought, DL doesn't have that many languages at present but they are working on an Irish one, so I thought maybe it could be time for Gaelic to hop on board.

Sorry for the late reply. Dunno, thing is these programs are legion, everyone is promising the world and I have yet to see one that actually delivers anything half-decent. They're mostly built on a standard schematic and somehow I fail to see how that takes into account the different distribution of problems in each language.

I think what we actually need is something that costs money but works, as opposed to a dozen freebies which don't really work.

The other thing is that one day somebody is going to get dragged over the coals for using free labour in a for-profit enterprise, which is illegal in most countries of the world.

The last time one of these popped up, it was LiveMocha, and the whole thing was plagued with inconsistencies as different people were tr*nsl*t*ng differently. And even when the material was all there, nothing was launched, as the team working on it wasn't big enough to hit the lower limits for the number of approvals required to publish a sentence. Hundreds of man-hours wasted with nothing to show for it. Then LiveMocha started closing free courses in favour of selling a package deal with the book publishers Collins, before eventually being bought out by Rosetta Stone who wanted to use the platform to launch their own courses in online format. LiveMocha's still trundling along, but it's not a development priority and will no doubt wither over time.

I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar happen to DuoLingo - as a question-and-answer engine it's pretty slick and fairly comprehensive, and it shouldn't be hard for any buyer to integrate their own material with it.