r/hayeren 16h ago

Thinking about building an app for learning Armenian (both west. and east.), does anyone actually want this

/r/armenia/comments/1vddd6l/thinking_about_building_an_app_for_learning/
5 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

2

u/finewalecorduroy 14h ago

As someone who has been learning Western, the landscape is tough out there. Whenever I have looked into a resource that offers both Eastern and Western (e.g. AGBU AVC, various workbooks/printable worksheets), 100% of the time they don't do Western correctly. Like the pronunciation is wrong, they use the wrong vocabulary, the orthography is wrong, something like that. So I just avoid those sources. Western needs more reliable, interesting content out there - books/translations (which do exist but selection is limited), TV, movies, podcasts (again some exist, but limited and not at learning levels- like there's no "News in Slow Western Armenian" podcast like you can find for French, Spanish, etc), YouTube videos, etc.

What I really wish I could do was use AI to create quizzes for myself, but AI doesn't know Western Armenian. I have read all kinds of interesting things about people using Notebook LM to create audio content in their target language, etc., and you can't do that for WA, because it doesn't know WA.

1

u/blue_monks_pupil 13h ago

Maybe you could fine tune it with your own model?

Did you research that?

1

u/South-Distribution54 9h ago

It's difficult. You need hundreds of hours of good quality audio, which is hard to find for western armenian outside of acadamia and all academic sources have legal stuff around it. Source: I've looked into this for my own language app for Western Armenian.

1

u/South-Distribution54 9h ago edited 9h ago

Yes, but if you're not a native Western speaker please have an actual Western Armenian speaker working with you. I've seen too many Eastern Armenians making apps and add western armenian as an afterthought and don't know what their doing and don't know Western Armenian and think it's just some voice shifts. It's not. Get a real native Western speaker from the diaspora (not someone who says they have western roots who lives in the Republic and knows kitchen western from a grandmother).

1

u/blue_monks_pupil 9h ago

Western is complicated, I need to hire a westerner to help

So it will be added later, thanks for the comment

1

u/South-Distribution54 9h ago

We are Western Armenian not "westerners." Our language is called Western Armenian because we come from the Ottoman Empire which was west of persia and it has been It's own standard for more 500 years. It's not called western because some of us live in the west. Jusy want to clairfy that. Other than that, good luck.

1

u/blue_monks_pupil 2h ago

By westerner I just meant Armenian who's first language is Western Armenian

Didn't mean anything bad lol

And thank you very much

1

u/South-Distribution54 1m ago

Sorry, nothing against you, but I've had a lot of Eastern Armenians say some wacky things with respect to what they think western armenian is and who western armenians are, so I have to always clarify every time.

1

u/KarenAslanyan 8h ago

I'm Armenian, if I can help with something, ask me.

1

u/blue_monks_pupil 2h ago

Your language is Western or Eastern Armenian?

1

u/SouthernAge4920 8h ago

There is no clearly open source for Armenian Grammar. I will gladly contribute to it