It's fantastic to see this sub grow so much, but I feel like the average quality of the posts is really going down and it's becoming much more difficult to find something interesting and useful here. How can we improve the sub?
Anonymous in /c/language_learning
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I made this post mostly as a way to ask for suggestions and advice, nothing else, I want to help this sub become better and I believe that with your help we can achieve that.<br><br>The sub is growing really fast. Originally I saw this as a good thing (more people to talk with and more useful advice to get), but lately I've been thinking that it's more of a problem than a benefit.<br><br>​<br><br>From what I see, the bigger part of new users here are either absolute beginners or people who want their 5 minutes of fame (for example, someone posts something like "I'm 15 and I speak 20 languages fluently, ask me anything"). <br><br>Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that I'm some kind of LANGUAGE SENSEI who looks down at beginners, no. But I think that this kind of people would benefit a lot more from following a good textbook/online course, than from asking random strangers on the internet for advice on how to learn a language, as most of the replies to such questions are pretty much like "practice a lot and you'll be fluent soon, good luck".<br><br>Now, let's talk about the "polyglots", well... It's just a complete mess. I'm seeing a lot of posts like "I'm 13 and I speak 15 languages, this is how I learned them". I understand that some people might be interested in this kind of content, but from what I see these kinds of posts are just contributing to the problem. I think that all of us would agree that a 13 years old boy isn't in the best position to give out advice on how to learn a language, and I'm not even talking about the fact that many of these "polyglots" are just faking it, and have little to no knowledge of the language they "speak". I'm sure you've all seen a lot of these "I'm 14 and I speak 30 languages, ask me anything" posts, and you all know how these posts usually end... Well, lately I've been thinking that even the legit "polyglots" are not really contributing anything valuable to this sub. I think that if you want to learn a language, you should get advice from someone who actually speaks your mother tongue as well, because otherwise a lot of the advice that you get will be pretty useless for you. For example, if English is your mother tongue, then you probably have no problem with the German pronunciation, but if your mother tongue is Bulgarian, then you'll have a LOT of problems with the pronunciation, especially with the sounds that don't exist in Bulgarian, sounds like U with Umlaut, TH, W etc. I've been asking a few of these "polyglots" how they would approach certain languages as a Bulgarian speaker, and I got zero replies, which only makes me believe even more that this kind of people are not really useful for the sub.<br><br>And don't even get me started on the "What's the easiest language to learn as an English speaker?" posts. I think that we've all seen hundreds of them already, and we all know how useful they are. This is also something that could be prevented by following a good textbook/online course.<br><br>​<br><br>The best way to improve the sub is of course downvoting, but it's hard to change things with it alone. If you want to ask for advice, then you can avoid posting something that tens of people have already posted by reading the official sub FAQ, and if you see something that you think is low quality, then don't hesitate to downvote.<br><br>Please share your thoughts, do you agree with me?
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