LibreLingo - Open source language learning platform

Libre Lingo is an Open Source alternative to DuoLingo

Yesterday, on November 24, 2021, I asked on the the Duolingo forum if people know how the file format of Duoling looks like. My thought was that I would like to have a Ladino course, but I assume that most of the Ladino speaker are older than me and the majority is probably not that much into technology. So I thought I'll become some kind of a bridge between the people who know the language and the data format. For that I wanted to know what is that I (or they) will have to deal with.

I did not get an answer, but people pointed me to a post that says Duolingo stopped accepting volunteers for their languages.

It is now totally unclear when and how they will create Ladino course.

Someone suggested wikibooks, but I don't think that's a good platform for language learning.

Then I found LibreLingo created by Dániel Kántor a Hungarian guy living in Barcelona. So today I played with it a bit and filed a few bug reports.

Let me collect some thoughts what might want to do with this project.

  1. First of all I need to see if I get responses from Dániel or from other developers. As I can see from the GitHub reports of the contributors it is mostly him and a bot.
  2. I already sent a pull-request with some changes to the documentation. I would like to see how fast it is accepted or at least how fast I get a response to it.
  3. I guess the next thing will be to be able to set up the development environment locally.
  4. Then I need to find out if there is already some tool to show all the course content on a single page to make it easily searchable also to people who are not familiar with GitHub and YAML files. There was some hint about it in this discussion.
  5. I wonder if it would be possible/desirable to created a Dockerised development environment. It will be easier for other people to start contributing to the code and maybe also to the content.
  6. Then I guess I'll have to create the skeleton of the Ladino from English and Ladino from Spanish courses and see if I can use them locally.
  7. In the meantime I have to go over the Ladino video course I found to have some basics.
  8. I think a big item that is missing from Libre Lingo is hearing the sounds of the language. I'll need to ask about that too as without hearing the language it is really hard to learn it. With Ladino it is also extra interesting to hear the differences between Ladino and modern day Spanish spoken in Spain or in Latin-America.
  9. The Ladino version of Wikipedia has 5 different writing modes. 4 using latin letters and one using Hebrew letters. It will be a very interesting challenge to see how that can be mapped, but for now I'll have to do with one of the spellings. Probably the one the closest to modern day Spanish.
  10. Once we managed to deploy the first versions of the Ladino courses I'd be interested to make sure the system can handle a language using the Hebrew Alphabet written from right to left. That would open the possinilities to Hebrew, Yiddish and other RTL languages such as Arabic and Persian.

Anyway, let's see the responses.