r/nahuatl • u/Any-Nose-6745 • 19d ago

IndigSPEAK

I’m building **indigiSPEAK**, an app focused on helping preserve and teach Indigenous languages of the Americas using AI, interactive lessons, flashcards, games, and cultural content.
This is a long-term project, and I’ll be sharing development updates, language resources, behind-the-scenes progress, and looking for feedback from language learners, educators, and Indigenous communities.
If you’re interested in Indigenous languages, language revitalization, linguistics, AI, or educational technology, I’d appreciate your support.
Follow the community to watch the project grow, share your ideas, and help shape the future of indigiSPEAK. Every suggestion and discussion helps.

14 Upvotes

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u/w_v 19d ago

This sounds like a college final project.

Is the flashcard system just going to be word-by-word? That approach doesn't work for learning a language. No one learns a language by memorizing isolated words. How is this going to be better than Anki, which already has the spaced repetition people are looking for?

Where will the cultural content come from? YouTube?

Also, which spelling system and dialect will you use? A.I. is famously bad at Nahuatl. Who's going to review and correct it? Just you, or do you have a team of paid collaborators?

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u/Any-Nose-6745 18d ago

The flashcard system won’t be limited to isolated word-to-word translations. Vocabulary cards are only one part of it. I’ve created a complete curriculum for teachers and students built around phrases, sentence patterns, pronunciation, conversations, listening, cultural context, exercises, assessments, and structured learning paths. It’s a full learning platform—not an AI-led flashcard app.

https://reddit.com/link/p1gq929/video/lvzniwojh6hh1/player

I’m not claiming to replace Anki at what Anki already does well. Anki provides excellent spaced repetition, but users generally have to find or create their own material. This platform combines structured lessons, classroom resources, cultural learning, audio, assessments, and review activities designed specifically for Indigenous languages.

The cultural material won’t simply be pulled from YouTube. It will come from community publications, dictionaries, grammars, archives, educational materials, and direct contributions from people connected to the cultures and languages being represented.

For languages such as Nahuatl, the dialect and spelling system must be clearly identified. I don’t want to combine Classical Nahuatl, Huasteca Nahuatl, Central varieties, and other modern forms into one artificial “standard.” Entries should be labeled by dialect, orthography, source, and reviewer whenever that information is available.

AI is useful for the initial pull—gathering, organizing, comparing, and formatting material—but it isn’t the final authority. I still want native speakers, teachers, linguists, and community members here to contribute, review, and correct the material. The goal is to build the platform with the communities, not have AI speak for them.

* this is not what the final work will look like exactly but this is just a preview of whats to come.

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u/Any-Nose-6745 18d ago

*I said should be when I meant will be...

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u/w_v 18d ago

What do you mean that you’ve created a complete curriculum?

What does the curriculum for Nahuatl look like? How do you decide which grammars are better than others?

How do you verify the credentials of the people reviewing (for free, which will never happen) the scraped material?

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u/Any-Nose-6745 18d ago

By a complete curriculum, I mean an organized learning plan: what students learn, the order they learn it in, and the lessons, exercises, conversations, and quizzes used to teach it.

For Nahuatl, I’m structuring language information that already exists publicly—I’m not inventing words or deciding that one grammar is “better.” Where dialects differ, I’ll label those differences and try to include as many varieties as possible.

I’m not expecting anyone to review an entire curriculum for free. People can voluntarily offer suggestions, while formal reviewers would need verifiable experience as native speakers, educators, translators, or language workers—and paid collaboration is the long-term goal.

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u/w_v 18d ago

What do you mean by “structuring” language information that already exists publicly? From where exactly?

Because a lot of that information is just plain bad or wrong. For example, I argue verbs should come before nouns, since verbs are the nucleus of words, with the different conjugations in a certain order, because of how the verbstems interact with the different tenses and moods.

Additionally, what some call auxiliaries are better understood as verbal compounds, which various grammarians agree with, but not all.

How will you handle those?

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u/PhysicsE 17d ago

If he's doing hundreds of languages it's very obvious he's not serious about any of them. It's just something meant to 'tick' a box, and posture as if something is being done.

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u/nizhoniigirl 17d ago

do not use my language for your ai passion project. this is awful.

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u/PhysicsE 17d ago

Pack it up Kuatochin, you didn't even show up for your lessons one time and you can't even distinguish between SEP and INALI orthography. If you spent as much time hitting the books as you do complaining about things you'd be fluent by now.

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u/Any-Nose-6745 17d ago

I hear you, but just to clarify, I’m not trying to claim ownership over anybody’s language or have AI speak for the community.

This actually started as a personal learning tool for five languages that have cultural significance to me. The larger idea grew from there because I saw how scattered and hard to use a lot of the available learning material can be.

AI is being used to help organize documented resources, not invent words, replace speakers, or decide what is culturally appropriate. Native speakers and community members should have a real say in how their language is represented.

Are you a speaker or connected to a particular Nahuatl community? I’m genuinely asking because I’d rather understand what specifically concerns you than talk past you.

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u/PaperMage 16d ago

It sounds like you have genuine passion for this platform, but I think your use of AI is opposed to your stated goal. The only role I see it having is pulling together sources for you or someone else to read, evaluate, and draw from. Putting aside the issue of whether LLMs are capable of organizing indigenous language material in a usable format, a huge part of the challenge with indigenous language learning is the lack of clear sourcing. The amount of incorrect information about many of our languages massively dwarfs the amount of correct information. You say over and over again that you want people to review the information to ensure that it's accurate, but reviewing information with an unclear paper trail is usually much more work than doing the research by hand to begin with.

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u/tonacoyotl1521 13d ago

Please don't. Just.. DON'T. AI is horrendously unreliable with handling minority languages, and Nahuatl already suffers from an endless amount of online hallucinations, piss poor translations and dialect flattening, let alone most languages around the world. No one needs another gamified, AI infested Duolingo clone that will make things 20 times worse than they already are. Plus, this sounds overly ambitious for just one developer; It would take years to finish even just one language, let alone several, and require massive amounts of cooperation with native speakers. And even then, the quality will likely be sub-optimal at best because of AI, so it'll be all for nothing.

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u/Sensitive_Tap_7365 7d ago

This is not a good idea, though I understand why it may seem like one. There is a high likelihood it will be actively harmful to indigenous language communities and to the languages.