I've got an idea that I think might be good for both Steemit and Duolingo and I want your input.

How many of us on Steemit are also using Duolingo to learn languages? It seems like the crossover might be pretty substantial?

I've got an idea. I'm sure the same thing has occured to others, but I haven't seen anyone mention it.

But, first, here's a little about my experience on Duolingo:

I started using Duolingo to brush up on my long inactive French. I had taken French for three years in Junior High, three years in High School, and two years in college. Most importantly I had hated every second of it. I was terrible at French, and I hated it. Verb conjugation, adjective agreement, tenses, Camus, Sartre, Zola, French History...I hated them all because they seemed to hate me and my attempts to learn them. I had also visited France for a week in high school where it seemed like every French person hated me trying to speak their language. I live in the western United States, and really it's ridiculous to learn any language other than Spanish. But, my father had insisted that French was heavily used in diplomatic circles and he had selected that course of study for me as an 11 year old.

When Duolingo came along, I hadn't actively studied French for about 15 years. I thought it might be nice to see if I remembered anything at all. I also wanted to see if the 15 years had lessened my hatred of learning this wretched language.

So, I was about to start the Duolingo French course. Gamification, visual learning, no grammar.........ha! None of that could possibly overcome the mutual enmity I shared with my greatest academic enemy!!!! But, then I took the course. It was all true. It was like a video game. It was fun. It was reactivating my French. I remembered 1000% more than I thought. It turned out I was actually pretty good at the questions they were asking. I was able to test out of at least 50% of the units I tried. The rest of them were fairly easy. Maybe I didn't actually hate French. WTF!?! Maybe I just hated the way it had originally been taught to me!!!

So next, I turned my sights on a language I was actually interested in: Irish. In the U.S. we sometimes call this language "Gaelic" or "Irish Gaelic". But, in Ireland they just call it "Irish" (when referring to it in English anyway) to help disambiguate the native language from the type of Gaelic spoken in Scotland. My great-grandfather had come to the U.S. from County Cork, Ireland, and by all accounts had been a bilingual speaker of Irish and English. Also, my surname is Irish and it occured to me that no on in the family knew how to pronounce the name in Irish or even how it was properly spelled in its native language. My last name (like many Irish surnames) had been anglicized a LONG time ago due to political and historical pressures.

Again, I really should have been starting the Duolingo Spanish course at this time, but I felt like this was family business that needed to be attended to. Who doesn't know how to pronounce their own last name in it's native tongue?!? So, I completed the Irish Duolingo course. I think I might have been one of the first 150 or so people to finish it. Then I went back and got all the skills to 100%. Then Duolingo changed the audio from a speaker of dubious accent to a verifiably native speaker of Irish. I then went back and started redoing all the units with the new audio. I could now spell and even pronounce my last name in original form. This was good. The crazy part is that it had all been free. I had discovered the greatest language learning tool I'd ever seen and it was completely free. I had paid MUCH, MUCH more for something that was much less effective back in college. But, I didn't just have Duolingo the corporate entity to thank for all this.

Here's where Steemit comes in!

The whole time I was doing the Irish course on Duolingo, I had been keenly aware that Duolingo hadn't made the Irish course like they had the big languages. Duolingo staff made courses for langugages like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German. But, volunteers make the smaller languages like Irish. A few bilingual Irish people had put together this entire course. I had spent countless hours being enriched by this learning experience and the people who had provided it to me had done it out of the goodness of their hearts?!? It had taken me months to go through the course as a student. How long had it taken them to create the course?!? So, Crazy!!! They had created the course, monitored and fixed all the mistakes after launch, helped coordinate the new audio, and now they are even adding to the course to create an expanded 2.0 version of the course tree. As near as I can tell, these people hadn't been rewarded for this in any visible way and 1.9 million people had been exposed to the Irish language through their course.

So, here's my Idea:

One of the central principles of Steemit is that original, valuable content should be rewarded. I ask you, what is more valuable and original than an entire language course that 1.9 million people have enjoyed and used to learn a whole language. Is that not worth more than a makeup tutorial or a blog about a girl on some beach somewhere. We should encourage all of the volunteer teams on Duolingo to start making updates on the progress of their courses on Steemit so that we can reward them for all their hard work. There are also some heavily demanded courses like Thai that have been at 99% completion for months and haven't been completed because the volunteers haven't been able to get past that last 1% for whatever reason. I think something like this might provide just enough pecuniary incentive to speed up the volunteer development of a lot of those courses. This will also be good for the Steemit platform since the Duolingo user base is 120 million registered users globally. A great many of those users are very grateful to these volunteer course developers and many of them will come to Steemit just for the chance to reward them. Obviously this idea has much broader applicability than just Duolingo. It could be used to reward a broad spectrum of volunteer sourced content from other platforms. We already see this with cryptocurrency/blockchain code contributors coming on Steemit, describing what they've done and getting rewards. Now, we just have to get those same types of volunteer creators (who ended up in non-crypto related fields) to use Steemit to update everyone on the progress of whatever they are creating and get rewarded for their valuable work. We as citizens of the web are the recipients of a whole lot of free value. Maybe we can get even more value if we encourage the creators of that value to come over here and pick up a little reward for their work. Maybe this is already happening on a big scale and I just haven't noticed. Or maybe it will inevitably happen on its own without us doing anything. But, I thought it might be worth discussing it right now at the beginning of Steemit.

Let me get your input:

1. What do you think? Is it worth encouraging the volunteer teams to sign up over here and make updates on course progress?
2. Is this something Luis von Ahn and company would discourage?
3. What other platforms would you like to see this be applied to?
4. Other thoughts?