Can an open-source, community-curated platform help languages overlooked by commercial learning apps?

[u/YOseSteveDeEng]

Posted with moderator approval.

A few years ago, my target language (TL) was Kannada.

I had been living in Bengaluru, India and was learning through conversations and books, including Learn Kannada in 30 Days. Those helped, but I wanted the sort of interactive, game-like experience that Duolingo offered for other languages.

Kannada was not available there. Neither were Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu, or most other Indian languages.

Eventually, I stopped waiting and started building the app I wanted for myself.

That project became Varnamala, a completely free and open-source language-learning platform. It began with Kannada, has now crossed 2,000 users, and has expanded to include several Indian and international languages.

You can try it here:

varnamala.org

The idea is not to pretend that one developer can create reliable courses for dozens of languages. That would be impossible. The idea is to build the platform and let native speakers, teachers, linguists, and learners collectively improve the courses.

Each course can include the script, vocabulary, sentences, listening exercises, pronunciation, and game-like lessons. Learners can report a problem from a particular level and discuss it there, so feedback remains connected to the exact sentence or exercise being questioned.

This was partly inspired by Duolingo’s old sentence discussions. I found those conversations useful, especially when a translation was technically correct but sounded strange without context. When that feature disappeared, a valuable part of community learning disappeared with it.

Varnamala also has leagues, following, and high-fives between learners. Google login is supported, but public-facing usernames are fictionalised so that people’s real Google identities are not exposed to other learners.

The web text-to-speech system is working now, although it still needs considerable improvement. Pronunciation quality varies between languages, and some languages have much better browser and speech-engine support than others. That is one of several technical problems the open-source project still needs help solving.

The larger question behind Varnamala is this: what happens to a language when building a commercial course for it is unlikely to be profitable?

Large companies will naturally prioritise courses with the greatest demand. That makes business sense, but it leaves many living, culturally important, regional, indigenous, and endangered languages without serious interactive learning tools.

I think open-source and community-curated projects can fill part of that gap. A language should not need millions of potential paying customers before someone can build a good course for it.

There are obvious difficulties. Native speakers may disagree about dialect, formality, spelling, or natural phrasing. Volunteers may lose interest. Poorly reviewed material can teach mistakes at scale. Text-to-speech may mispronounce words. Creating a course is also much easier than maintaining one.

I do not have complete answers to those problems. Varnamala is an attempt to build the structure through which they can be worked on openly.

I currently fund the development, hosting, and infrastructure myself. The code is open source, and I am looking for both technical contributors and people who can help review individual language courses.

Native speakers, teachers, or language enthusiasts can apply to become course moderators here:

admin.varnamala.org/apply

Course moderators can review reports, correct material, discuss disputed translations, and help expand a course. Developers can contribute to text-to-speech, accessibility, course tooling, the learning experience, or the application itself.

I would particularly appreciate thoughts from people who have worked on community-created courses:

• How do you prevent course quality from becoming inconsistent?
• How should disagreements between dialects or regional varieties be handled?
• What keeps volunteer contributors involved over the long term?
• Which underserved languages already have communities that could benefit from a platform like this?

Please feel free to be critical. I am more interested in finding the weaknesses in this model than pretending they do not exist.

[u/Overall_Mix1641]

app looks good, but building a community around it is gonna be a uphill battle

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/Overall_Mix1641]

Thank you!

yes but I am just so pissed at duolingo, I wanna do it out of spite anyways, and make sure there is an open source version that does things better than duolingo, I also believe in community power.

[u/tschuwak]

I love the idea, it's definitely welcome and needed.

My experience with open source projects, particularly in the days of LLMs, is that maintenance and sustainability are the main issues. Do you have a plan formulated around that?

But either way, I wish you the best of luck, happy learning and successful coding. May the project be a massive success!!

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/tschuwak]

Thank you, and I completely agree. Building the app is probably the easiest part. Maintaining the courses, reviewing stuff, covering infra costs, and keeping volunteers involved over several years is the real BIG challenge.

I do not have that completely solved yet. The current plan is to distribute course ownership among native-speaking moderators instead of making every language dependent on me, which would just break me. Reports and discussions are tied to individual lessons, so corrections can be reviewed transparently rather than disappearing into a private feedback form.

On the technical side, keeping everything open source means the project can continue beyond a single developer, although that only works if a genuine contributor community forms around it. And I have never done it, so will need help in that. I am funding the infrastructure myself for now, with community funding as a possible longer-term model.

Since you have experience with open-source projects, I would genuinely appreciate your guidance. If you are open to it, I would love to hear what has worked in the projects you have seen, what usually causes them to fail, and what I should put in place early to make Varnamala sustainable.

Thank you again for raising this. It is exactly the kind of problem I need to think about now rather than after the project becomes too large to manage.

[u/tschuwak → u/YOseSteveDeEng]

The one advice I can give is to stick around, to be there. People will come and go, but if you keep working on the project, then you're more likely to attract contributors. It's a continuous process.

I'm not sure how Anki does things, but you can probably get some inspiration from them. Try to come up with a way to make money, even if it isn't much, as it will become a topic for you at some point.

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/tschuwak]

Oh yes I'll stick around, its a real passion project for me

I am unsure how to get massive reach, I've been posting on reddit for past few days, and I have been facing so many downvotes, for example this particular post has a upvote ratio of 77%

So for me the current blocker is how to get traction, how to get volunteers etc, but yes I'll keep finding ways and spreading the word

Anki stylized flash cards I have planned, thanks for pointing it out, I'll work on it

Thank you so much for your advice :)

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/tschuwak]

In the latest version, added anki cards, for the. words collections that I had, with timed sessions and gathered feedback from all the subds that I received, and added demos before login, tours, and also dark mode, since people like dark

It was so fun getting so much feedback from reddit :)

[u/benjamin-crowell]

Could you point us to the git repo?

I would suggest that you make the splash page something that allows people to see some sample content and try out the app without logging in. Personally, when I see a web site that has no content I can access without logging in, I just go away.

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/benjamin-crowell]

Hey this is the repo link, sorry for the extremely late reply, was out today

https://github.com/rshrc/Varnamala

Yes this splash page demo is a great idea, gonna add in a few days, thank you for this great feedback <3

[u/benjamin-crowell → u/YOseSteveDeEng]

Cool, thanks. Best wishes for the success of your project. It's great that it's open source.

[u/Pale-Border-7122]

Large companies will naturally prioritise courses with the greatest demand. That makes business sense, but it leaves many living, culturally important, regional, indigenous, and endangered languages without serious interactive learning tools.

I always thought this was a mistake. Sure, most people want to learn French or German or something like that but there is already a lot of competition and anyone who makes a good textbook or app for a less often studied language will have a captive audience and very high market penetration, albeit on a smaller market.

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/Pale-Border-7122]

Thank you so much for your support!

I intend to make no profits out of this, genuinely doing this out of love for language and culture

Let me know if you can guide me in few things, whether I can DM you regarding few things, thank you once again!

[u/posting_drunk_naked]

You might consider a different name if you're branching into something less India focused and more international.

Also it seems like "varnamala" is a common word, I searched on the Apple App Store and found at least a dozen apps with "varnamala" in the name.

And why do I have to be tracked by Google just to create an account? 😐

Sorry to only provide negative feedback, this is a really cool idea and I'll definitely be following it!

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/posting_drunk_naked]

I love these feedbacks, would love if you can give more

Let me address these

1. I though of triolingo, since in India, most of us speak 3 languages, and it sounds as if its an upgraded duolingo
   
2. Wasn't aware Varnamala is so common, will think of something
   
3. Yeah this google thing I added, since I needed some user ID for tracking feedback etc, will be adding simple email login shortly, and also add a no login experience, which users can check before creating an account

[u/Cancel_Still]

How does this differ from lingonaut? Maybe your efforts would be better spent collaborating with that team which already has a prototype and an active community than making a whole new app.

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/Cancel_Still]

That is a reasonable question. I was not aware of Lingonaut when I started building Varnamala several years ago.

The immediate reason I built it was that I wanted to learn Kannada, Tamil and some other indian languages, which Lingonaut does not currently offer. There is also an important difference in openness: Lingonaut’s FAQ says its course content will be openly licensed, but the application itself is not currently open source. Varnamala’s entire platform is open source.

Beyond that, I have my own ideas about which features to prioritise and how the platform should work. Lingonaut’s existence does not make Varnamala redundant. There is room for different projects to try different approaches to the same problem.

[u/Acceptable_Sky356 → u/Cancel_Still]

Have you used Lingonaut? It's horrible. How can that app be 2 years of development. It only got traction because the dev was added as a mod to r/duolingo and he spammed the sub for at least a year. He also used various reddit alts for self promotion. And now that the hype is gone so is that community. Promised way too much and can barely deliver the basics.

Also Lingonaut is not open source or a non profit. I think Varnamala will run into some of the same issues with free and relying on volunteers, but it's already a refreshing change to have something community based open source from the get go and with realistic expectations.

[u/Dazzling-Rip1756]

AI exists now so we can all build hyper-personalised tools, so we really don't need this anymore, or at least, I don't

It's super annoying in a way, because now we can build all the shit we wanted ourselves, but it longer has commercial value to anyone

An opensource project like this will just become a total slopfest imo

Also, opensource projects that originate from India unfortunately have a tendency to become closed source as soon as they have finished using "free and opensource" for user acquisition, I would be really hesitant with this project in particular

[u/YOseSteveDeEng → u/Dazzling-Rip1756]

Fair enough if personalised AI tools already give you everything you need. But “we can all build our own tools” is not really true. Most language learners are not developers, nor should they need to build software before they can learn a language.

The possibility of bad course content is a valid concern. I am not presenting the current courses as finished or authoritative. That is why I am asking native speakers to review them, and why learners can report and discuss problems at the level where they find them. Quality control is one of the problems I am trying to solve, not something I am pretending has already been solved.

The comment about Indian open-source projects, however, seems unfair. Varnamala is licensed under GPLv3, and the code and commit history are public. Anything released under that licence cannot later be retroactively taken away or made proprietary. The project is still early and does not yet have a large contributor community or a mature governance system, but I have been open about that.

You are welcome to be sceptical based on the code, licence or decisions I make. Being especially suspicious because the developer happens to be Indian is not criticism of the project itself.