Since it looks like Spanish and German may be on the horizon, are there any languages you’d particularly like to see on Natively in the future?
I’m hoping for Chinese to complete the East Asian trifecta; then I won’t have to read manhua in English! 
Haha, me too! I have a lower intermediate level in Chinese, so it would be really nice to see Natively add it. It’s hard to find level appropriate material, and I have a fair amount of stuff that I could grade. I read a lot of web novels, so it wouldn’t work too well until that functionality is added in November or so though…
French b/c then maybe I’ll actually use the French I learned in school all those years ago (if it’s added I’ll use it as an excuse to reread le petit prince 
)
Romanian b/c my sister is learning it, Russian b/c a friend is learning it.
The other language I’d want to track is Irish, but I doubt that’ll be added since it’s not exactly a popular language to learn 
it would be nice though to be able to track my Irish books and films.
Really though all of these languages would be great to add 
Spanish and German make sense for a next step since that covers two popular languages in different language families.
I’m hoping to learn Swedish starting next year (assuming my personal life / schedule stops being so chaotic) so I suppose I’d like Swedish, but I’m also not heart broken if it doesn’t get included. The language is much closer to English so the barrier to entry insofar as reading books is much lower.
This was immediate thought as well; having representation for the Big 3 would be really neat! Also voted for French so I have yet another reason to bug my sister about resuming her French studies, haha.
My other languages would be Finnish and Welsh. I’ve wanted to learn both for a long time and even own 2,5 books in Welsh from when I visited the country. Might be the incentive I need to get into it again. 
Mine would be Tagalog. I’ve only taken very baby steps toward learning it so far, but it’s much harder to find resources for it than Japanese (and harder to find good-quality resources in what does exist) so while it’s more niche than something like Spanish, it would be nice to have another resource for learning it 
It looks like there are lots of aspiring polyglots here!
@Belerith wants all the languages
French seems like a strong contender. Chinese I’d love too, but implementing search & getting meta data / creating the book addition process may be more difficult… so might hold off on that one til after the romance languages, we’ll see.
English is really interesting… and has potential to be the largest language, but probably (?) presents more complications 
German, Spanish, and French are the only three languages that I speak enough that I’d get any immediate use out of, but honestly, I’d take Natively in all the languages, thx.
This seems to be the case for most languages.
Agree!
Interested in what complications you forsee for different languages.
I’ve been thinking about examples such as Mandarin/Cantonese (similar writing, different speech), Hindi/Urdu (similar speech, different writing), Modern Standard Arabic (no native speakers, 250m+ L2 speakers), less-spoken languages that aren’t particularly well-served by Amazon/other big services and retailers (difficulty adding content), etc…
I don’t think Spanish/German/other major European languages would throw up those kinds of difficulties, but they may present challenges of their own.
Well, English is in it’s own category of issues, as the main problem is addressing the issue of native English speakers wanting to use the site as a GoodReads alternative. All other languages already mitigate this issue to a large extent because the website isn’t written in that language.
Otherwise, I think there are 3 main bucket of issues:
Search. Do we need to have special text handling? For example, in japanese I have a romanization converter so that people can search romanized japanese titles. This issue really only occurs for non latin languages.
Book meta-data providers. Is there one all-encompassing source of meta data that I can use? Or will I have to implement a patchwork of meta data providers? If there’s an amazon website for the language (like amazon.co.jp), most likely this is a non issue. For most romance language this is the case.
Dialects? I imagine most dialects will be handled via tags, however it does get a bit more complicated in some languages. For Japanese and Korean, there’s really only one dialect learners learn, so it’s not really an issue. For something like Spanish however, will we need different handling? My assumption is no… as they are mutually intelligible… but the difference between dialects & languages is a bit blurry. Generally, I think these things are pretty well established (Chinese ‘dialects’ are really languages, Spanish dialects are dialects… etc), but it is something to consider.
Edit: Yeah I have no idea about Arabic, i do find that’s a particularly strange case. Outside of religious writing, is there a lot of standard Arabic native content? I have no idea. But I think it’ll be tricky for a lot of reasons… and probably for that reason it’ll come a bit later.
I smell a linguistic degree. 
For Spanish or Portuguese, it might be relevant for learners to distinguish the area for the audio section. There are noticeable differences for Latin American and European varieties.
Agreed. But will it need more handling than just dialect tags? That’s the question
I forgot about the tags again. Don’t mind me. Just being my forgettable self over here in the corner. 
Now I’m wondering about spoken languages with no written form (apparently this applies to more than half of all languages, and 80% of African languages! 
), creoles, sign languages… Interesting.
Unfortunately not, just an obsession interest in languages. 
https://arabicfiction.org/ is an international prize for arabic fiction. You can also see where the book is from: Iraq, Egypt, etc.
Idk how popular Arabic is. The different dialects are tricky too. I just wanted to introduce some of contemporary Arabic fiction.
I was thinking about this last night, and I think it makes sense to avoid adding English for that reason. Maybe there’s some way around it (ask for a user’s native language and don’t let them add content in that language?), but on the whole it’s risky.
Of course, it’s the same reason I don’t think you should have added a way to track videos that were watched with English subs, since that also encourages people to track all their content here instead of just their language learning content.
Agreed. Additionally you’ll potentially have to handle foreign languages in the forums, which could also add complication. Wouldn’t really be inclined to add English anytime soon… the only reason would be if a competitor went after it.
Heh, yeah we agree on the problem there, but disagree on the solution. I think having a ‘disallowed’ english subs option which points you to a status discourages people marking things watched with english subs as watched.
If I didn’t have any outlet for that, people would be much more inclined to include their english subs things incorrectly here imo.
We agree though on the issue
Edit:
Yeah I don’t think non-written languages would work on Natively
Nice! Yeah, it does illustrate the difficulty though. It also seems dividing them up into dialects vs languages is quite political too!
