Gadgetory

I love Star Trek but can I call myself a Trekkie if I can't speak Klingon well today is a good day to learn because now duolingo offers free Klingon lessons duolingo is a free language learning app you can also use it on your desktop through a web portal I've used duolingo to brush up on my Spanish but now anyone can test their tongue with the complicated sounds of Klingon like and the duolingo system is interactive quizzing you with images and helping the vocab stick with repetition making you speak and type out answers the course was designed by five Klingon speaking superfan volunteers and it has the official license and seal of approval from CBS which owns the rights to Star Trek so how do you design a course for a fantasy language to answer that I spoke to the Klingon leave course contributor Felix Melman Beck hi all right I gotta start off with how does one become an expert in Klingon that's that is a good question I'm not quite sure how I got here myself I originally you know browsed various sites on the internet and then eventually ended up getting let's hear if I can find the Klingon dictionary by Marc Okrand looks like this and that is pretty much how you get started this book is like a really comprehensive guide to the grammar if you enjoy it then it makes for you know like three or four nights worth of pleasant night reading there are real grammar rules for Klingon it was created by a linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek franchise the Klingon speaking community is sort of or at least most active Klingon speakers have this Canon policy that only Marc Okrand is allowed to make up new words and grammar rules he actually didn't Institute that rule himself it's actually like just us thinking if we if we spread this out too much it's going to start the language is going to start getting too nice to us essentially it's going to be conformed too much to our expectations and also we're going to have we might get these like different schools of thought about how clean are should be spoken the course development started in 2015 and since then nearly a hundred and seventy thousand duolingo users have shown interest in signing up for clay on my goal has been to gradually introduce grammar and then hit people with lots of vocabulary and try to make the sentences earthlies occasionally a bit fun to help them just sort of encourage them to get over that first barrier to entry when you're learning a language I feel like it's a little bit of a mean language like the some of the examples were like he's young and stupid yes because I mean it is a tough culture I would say but like I saw we are big you are small yes I I gotta learn the pronunciation here I guess that is our thing about duolingo you can actually hear it right so you know Matlin sooo much you know I'm probably probably not doing it right though you were close but it's a mock pin too much duolingo needed special programming to handle Klingon no earth language uses apostrophes in the middle of words and Klingon has case sensitivity so a word can take on a different meaning if it is capitalized or lowercase is there a reason why some letters are capitalized their rule for capitalization or is it depend on the word with the with the consonants a sort of general rule is that if it's capitalized then it's not pronounced the way it is in English so for instance the capital H isn't a huh but rather it's a and the capital S is not us but rather off what's a good starter Klingon phrase or two or even word a good starter would be for instance qapla is the classic it means success and it's you with in all sorts of situations it can mean good luck well done Godspeed you didn't fail completely alright yes because if I read it I want to say qapla but it's it yes as you say like a lot of people they say car plow but what you want to do is actually cup la cop blah yes very good how tough is the app gonna be on my show really practice yeah it's it's definitely I currently have quite a lot of trouble with the sound I have a bit of a cold actually so don't take my my sound too seriously although actually yeah might actually help a bit I guess - all you language warriors looking for a good challenge good luck and comply