Off topic from flags and such, just surfacing that a user is having trouble registering to the Natively forums despite having an account. Link to their post on WK
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After further reflection, I will allow you to configure the flags for your languages 
The windows/chrome bug is only for form select dropdowns, which i’ll just get rid of the flags there. That won’t impact the top nav dropdown though. Those flags are images.
And on further reflection, I think I will change ‘status’ to ‘level’ and allow you to specify basic options (Learning, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Native).
I don’t know if I will surface that information anywhere, but it makes the form more intuitive hah.
It’s literally just a default. It’s the first language on your profile and if someone goes to your profile without the language specified, I redirect there.
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Absolutely hilarious. I now understand better why I’ve never even come across most of those flags.
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I meant that if you still want to grade just pick learning instead of fluent, and if you don’t want to grade pick fluent.
Are you not learning if you are beginner, intermediate, etc.? I’d just remove learning at that point.
I think primary and secondary might work better than main and non-main then.
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Do you plan on using that level information down the road? I was just thinking that it sounds like kind of a hassle to have to pick a specific level but never really have that info used anywhere on the site.
Honestly I don’t see why “native”, “main”, and “secondary” (for instance) wouldn’t work. Just have a little note saying that languages set to native won’t be allowed to grade things and leave it at that.
Granted, the “native” tag does lead to some confusion for those who may not consider themselves native speakers but aren’t learners, but either a note or a wording change would help that, I figure.
Hmmm. Or thinking about it, have those three options, but add separate checkboxes for if you want to be allowed to grade items for the language or not? It’s checked by default on native, say, but you could toggle it separately for other languages.
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Considering how many people are already on natively (and the internet in general) who are not native English speakers, but I cannot tell that they are not native speakers except that they have mentioned that, I think English is going to be kinda a mess… especially when you factor in that the interface is going to be in English anyway, so there’s going to be a strong bias towards high intermediate+ learners on the site which will probably skew the low level ratings.
Also, I’m still not quite sure why you can’t grade things in your native language. I’d personally rather have books with grades by native speakers than books with “?” levels in my target languages…
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I agree here; Natively’s main userbase using 100% English already is really going to skew learner numbers; I feel like the outreach that’ll be needed to draw in more active users might be difficult.
Honestly, my assumption is that native speakers are going to be awful at grading anything beyond “when you give a mouse a cookie” and “war and peace” together: they’re not going to be familiar with the struggles with grammar or slightly nonstandard vocab a learner is going to feel. I’ve seen people online say something like, “I don’t speak English natively, and I had to look up so many words in this book like “chivalry”, “pomegranate”, and “buzzword”; I’ve never seen those before in my years of studying!”, but those are all normal words to me that don’t even ping on my radar. I couldn’t even begin to come up with a fake example of hard grammar; I have no idea what that would look like offhand, beyond a sentence that’s a paragraph long or something.
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Natives can still add books and give a general level at that time I think. The problem is that as native speakers, most of us don’t have a very good idea of what’s hard for learners in our language. What’s hard for a learner isn’t necessarily going to be hard for a native, although generally something hard for natives is also hard for learners.
I’ve even had some trouble grading Spanish books, because while I know that some things are objectively hard, since they don’t bother me I don’t always notice them unless I pay attention. Like, I know that a sentence that’s over half a page long, and that happening multiple times in the book is hard, but how hard exactly?
I mean, for French I have a couple level ideas that I think will be somewhat accurate. But that’s based on child me struggling to read those books, meaning those are hard. You’re right though, I wouldn’t know where to start with English since I skipped that step.
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That’s another good point: how to assign a tentative book level based on an evaluation scale you’ve never had to be evaluated on? I was just trying to picture some books of my own in my head and trying to figure out what level I’d suggest for them if I were asked. What level is Gideon the Ninth? Redwall? Shakespeare: The World As Stage?
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I have exactly zero interest in spending my time grading anything in English, but I do plan to add some kids books that I think adults might genuinely enjoy but not come across as “books to read as a learner” but outside of that I’m too busy with finding content in languages I don’t already speak, lol
minor rant
omg stop telling people to read Harry Potter! Harry Potter is HARD. If you can read Harry Potter you’re already quite advanced!
I do agree in principle with this, although in practice word lookups can be very easy, and it’s really more like grammar that tends to make a text hard. And I’ve personally found that some very low level books are actually fairly difficult because they use specialized “baby grammar”.
linguistics tangent
Wow, it just occurred to me that people with multiple languages and/or languages in a similar family are going to think of grammar as very different levels too. Like when I first learned about indirect objects I had absolutely no clue what anyone was talking about because English rarely cares. But Japanese really helped because を makes it really easy to understand what the object is. When I went back to Spanish and French, it wasn’t even a problem anymore, I knew what a direct and indirect object was.
I have zero idea what my jlpt level is (N2 if I studied kanji and grammar? maybe?), but Natively’s elo levels make it easy to say “harder than X, easier than Y”. I think given enough graded books I could +/- 2 levels grade a book I’ve read in English.
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(not so) minor rant
It’s hard, I agree, but at least you get to read something familiar, so you can get away with reading above your level since you’ll get a lot from context. I feel like it’s also become a sort of a milestone that almost everyone can relate to across any language, since it’s been translated so much.
Also, for those of us that have read Harry Potter as a child, we can tell ourselves that we’ve reached that age, that level in our target language. So that can be motivating as well.
Harry Potter definitely shouldn’t be used as a first book to read in your target language though, that’s crazy. But hey, if people somehow manage to make that work, props to them, it’s just probably not the most effective use of their time.
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more ranting
I got told to read Harry Potter in Japanese 15 years ago. I had read the whole series before in English and thought it’d help me quite a bit. Failed miserably. Thought “welp, I guess learning Japanese is just impossible”. Gave away/sold all of my manga and Japanese novels and mostly gave up on ever learning another language. So it’s a bit of a sore subject for me
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I think I’m liking ‘Primary’, ‘Secondary’ & ‘Native’, like @seanblue (?) suggested. What do we think?
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@bibliothecary is learning so many languages that it’s causing a bug 
. The “un” label has gotten separated from the flag at the line break.
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This i now fixed 
Also, I have made my updates wrt the flags & statuses. Hopefully they make more sense. If they don’t let me know. Thanks for all your feedback!
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Someone is going to troll us by picking non-matching flags for their languages.
By the way, you should add a forum link to the user menu since you removed it from the main header bar.
Also, definitely include me in the “natives shouldn’t grade things” group. I have very little idea what is harder than what and why in English. I can tell you that high fantasy is generally harder than like teen targeted book or whatever, but I can’t tell you specifically why or by how much. And I’d never be able to pick up on grammar difficulty even if I can recognize (somewhat) when a book uses harder words.
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Absolutely will happen… oh well
Fair, will do.
WRT the native discussion, I agree that I’d prefer to default to not allowing it.
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I’ll pick the British flag for American English 
Actually, I’m never going to add anything in my native language in the first place… So not actually gonna use the feature. But if I was…
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Note to self: crazy I had the books damn near memorized from being obsessed with them as a kid and only N3 grammar under my belt. It was hard, sure, but not impossible.
I don’t think it should be suggested across the board, but if someone has intermediate grammar, patience for lots of lookups and the same childhood obsession with the book it can work.
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I agree with all these things. Frankly, I got so fed up, I made a website…
Even Yotsuba I struggled with and found the alternatives we now have (Happiness, Big Brother Rental, Flying Witch, Kuro) more approachable.
Side Note: I was looking the other day and I was happy to see that we now have 83 manga series at, or below, the level of Yotsuba. Lots of options!
Honestly, I think the only ‘across the board’ suggestion I find reasonable as a first book is the Magic Tree House series. Super straightforward grammar and sentences. Also it’s something I read over and over as a kid
But @cat is of course right that it depends on the person. I also think it depends on the language. Spanish I feel you can just guess so many words, it’s much more approachable…
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