Interesting. I didn’t realize that was your reasoning.
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I agree. My Spanish is very basic but based on my knowledge of it I think it could work the same way we treat Japanese dialects now. Meanwhile Mandarin, Cantonese, etc… those are all different languages even if they’re often called dialects.
Mandarin also has the added issue of simplified vs traditional… would those have to be separated as “different languages” even though it’s really the same language? Or would it be enough to simply have a content tag? I imagine if there’s simplified and traditional versions of the same book they would otherwise be the identical (and thus the same difficulty).
And then there’s me with my obsession with 関西弁 
I get what you mean though, Japanese has a lot of dialects but most learners just learn Standard, and any additional dialects that pop up are simply added difficulty. While with Spanish there’s more dialects a beginner may start with. But I think that could be accounted for with tags, not a whole new language.
I’d argue that they would work on Natively. You’d just have to disable book additions for that language and only allow audiovisual content. Some pseudocode:
if(language.boolWritten == true){
addBook(language)
}
else {
showPopup(“Sorry! " + language + " does not have a written form, so we cannot add books.”)
}
Probably more complicated to implement than that lol but disabling book additions should be possible, right?
Yeah this is the biggest difficulty I see for endangered languages (other than having enough users to make the grading system work). I think Natively would be an AMAZING resource for endangered languages. But speaking from experience, Amazon is horrendous at times for finding native content, I’ve had much better luck shipping from a bookstore that specializes in that language (which I’m lucky my studied language even has, many endangered languages don’t).
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Could possibly go the route of not requiring a book provider; the downside is that it would all be manual. Either the user types all info a la Goodreads, or the user provides the URL of the site they bought the book from and someone on brandon’s end has to key it in by hand.
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I don’t see this being a problem; if you can read one, you can generally read the other without much difficulty, native speaker or not.
他爸爸是我们公司的老板。(simplified)
他爸爸是我們公司的老闆。(traditional)
You don’t have to know Chinese to see that there’s not much difference between the two.
But we can definitely expect Braille and Egyptian hieroglyphics, right? 
Natively requires a lot less info that Goodreads, though. Title, ISBN, and image would be enough I’d imagine.
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I think that’s a bit of a too convenient example. Some of the simplifications have just changed the hanzi too much. True, natives can often read the other one without too much difficulty, but it still takes practice and a while to get used to.
Heres some of the depicted differences.
For a learner, you would only stick to either one anyway. Otherwise you’ll just get really confused. If I had decided to use traditional, I should be able to exclude all simplified books/sources.
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I mean, your examples don’t refute my point that they shouldn’t be treated as separate languages, so… 
Once tags are implemented I’d imagine it would be easy to filter simplified/traditional books if/when Chinese is added anyway.
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Yeah, traditonal vs simplified is another interesting question. Really most useful way to think about it from the common learners perspective imo.
I’d guess that the vast majority of people learning standard mandarin would learn simplified. However, something like Taiwanese Mandarin uses traditional i’ve heard. Should Taiwanese be it’s own language? Is Taiwanese mutually intelligible with standard Mandarin? I get conflicting answers online.
As many people would learn Taiwanese specifically, that’s a pretty relevant question for Natively.
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AFAIK all of the Chinese “dialects”/languages are written the exact same (minus the traditional/simplified character split obviously) but they are spoken completely differently so you might have to implement a different system for books vs. audiovisual.
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Adding French to avoid stuck up french speakers.
we have some lovely French speakers on this forum 
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I don’t doubt that.
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Aww come on now @WaniTsunami… I know it’s just a joke, but let’s not peddle in the negative stereotypes. We love all languages & native speakers here 
And, in any case, it looks like Natively is pretty excited to chat with French speakers, so you better watch out! 
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you better watch out! :fr: :fr:
Makes it look like youngster speak fr fr.
Anyway, I was about to say:
je n’ai pas de gants? La belle affaire! Je n’en avais qu’un seul… d’une très vielle paire. Encore m’était-il fort importun, je l’ai laissé dans la figure de quelqu’un.
so they better watch out
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Are you actually French, or trolling (or both)??
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Could be Canadian or Belgian.
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I think they should 
At least LingQ and Duolingo treat them as separate languages. Books would have versions in both Traditional vs Simplified so using “language” as the filter instead of tags makes more sense to me also from a usability perspective.
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You know, looking towards LingQ is probably a good guide, generally trust steve kaufmann.
Interestingly they say “Taiwanese” on the homepage, but ‘Chinese (Traditonal)’ with the Taiwanese flag in the header dropdown.
I’m guessing that it’s actually just Taiwanese?
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Yes.
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bien joué
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I think ‘Chinese (Traditonal)’ is the more inclusive term, since China did use traditional before the Communist Party simplified hanzi (in the 50’s somewhere?). I usually see Taiwanese used in listening context, like podcasts, though.
EDIT: Looking back at this a year later, Taiwanese can also refer to Hokkien (maybe even more frequently), so it’s it a bit ambiguous.
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