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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

Only complaint is they appear to have no priority in supporting languages of the East, where the majority of the world lives. I guess their main demo, at least at one point, was Western students, who aren't typically taught those languages in school.

In the least, teaching Mandarin should be a higher priority than half the languages they support.

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I've been learning Mandarin, and after searching for something like Duolingo found Chinese Skill [一]. It's not as good as Duolingo, but does include a way to teach characters. It would be great if it could have a drawing interface like Pleco [二] which can reliably recognise most characters I draw, with my terrible handwriting.

They do teach English to speakers of Chinese, Mandarin and Hindi.

[一] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chineseski...

[二] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pleco.chin...

Skritter will fix your Mandarin handwriting and tones if you use it regularly. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nwinter who did it is now doing a game to teach coding invested in by ycombinator.

Memrise has some decent Chinese decks.

But if you really want to learn the writing, get skritter. Absolutely worth the cost.

Yes, the majority of the world lives in the east. That means they should target (eg) Mandarin -> English instead of English -> Mandarin. Which is precisely what they're doing.

Their aim is to maximise their learning audience.

True, but the issue is the keyboard. Notice they don't have really any Cyrillic languages either. Trying to get people used to using many ALT and key combos is a tough starting point for a lot of gamified learners. Japanese has been on the block since Duolingo began, but again, the keyboard is the main hurdle.

The website currently provides clickable symbols. For mobile it's as easy as switching the language on your keyboard.

Might be wrong with this and it might not fit Duolingo's app but it would not be too bad to at least have spoken Japanese with romaji.

I think most people will admit that learning to write Japanese well is something not many foreigners will ever do, while speaking isn't that terribly difficult. I spent a little bit learning Japanese and I found that learning speaking + romaji only at first was not only easier, but helped when looking at symbols later (since I already knew how the words were said).

They offer cyrillic with the new Ukrainian course.

Fantastic new, I'll have to try it out then and see!

Anyone with dual language skills can contribute. http://incubator.duolingo.com/ I assume the problem is finding Mandarin / English speakers who are willing to spend the time on the course.

I am also very disappointed by this. I am mainly interested in learning Mandarin and Japanese. But Duolingo is so good that I decided to start learning Spanish with it till they support Mandarin or Japanese. Now it's one year later, still no Mandarin or Japanese and I ran out of motivation for Spanish a long time ago.

IIRC, they've said that they're targeting people learning english more than english speakers learning other languages. They have english courses in lots of languages.

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