[graypegg]

> I learned Turkish with lairner itself

Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?

> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.

I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?

[barrell]

Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.

This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.

[graypegg]

That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...

Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?

[moralestapia]

>How can you go to <INSERT_PLACE> if you haven't been there before.

[graypegg]

If the point of learning a language was to say new words to yourself, you can just make up words.

If you want to be understood and understand others, who ever "they" are sort of need to exist while you're learning.

I can promise you, speaking out of a phrase book burned into your brain with limited cultural knowledge from other people makes for a very boring cringeworthy conversation partner, and an awful language teacher.