Ladino tomorrow

Today I participated in an online panel called Jewish Language Project: Ladino Today a panel discussion of some of the central figures in the Academic world of Ladino. It was very fascinating and touched a lot of topics.

I am not in the academy. My interest for learning Ladino is to learn more about the culture and to be able to speak with people. I probably don't see many aspects of the questions, so let me just write down what I think could help others like me.

Many of the Ladino-related web sites look like they were build 20-25 years ago. Many seem to be unmaintained. I think it would be important to improve the look and the functionality of the web sites.

It would be important to have online dictionaries. I think having an open source Ladino dictionary hosted on wiktionary would be a good idea.

Getting Ladino to Google Translate could be useful.

People mentioned online applications and games.

I'd say a Ladino course on Duolingo would be fantastic, but LibreLingo might provide a much more suitable place for it as that can be a lot more flexible than Duolingo. I've already started creating 3 Ladino courses using English, Spanish, and Hebrew as the source languages.

To me having access to people who speak the language and who are interested in transferring it seem like a critical part. This could be done by encouraging people to offer Ladino classes via italki, but there could be also a more manual system of connecting Ladino students with Ladino speakers. I know Bryan Kirschen on Ladino Linguist has such a project for his students.

The Ladino version of Wikipedia has 3,607 pages and many of them only have a single line and as I can see there are many modern Spanish words used in the text. It might be more important to make other texts easily accessible online.

I started a page collecting resources about Ladino.