You can learn Klingon for free with daily 5-Minute lessons (You’re welcome)
Star Trek fans have been known to take their interest in the franchise pretty seriously. If you or someone you know is a diehard “Trekkie,” there’s a new way to take that fandom to the next level.
You can now actually learn to speak Klingon, one of the many fictional languages from the franchise. Even better? You can learn for free through an online course from Duolingo. The site offers game-like lessons that can be completed in five minutes a day. And you can learn anywhere with the Duolingo app.
Being fluent in Klingon might not be the most useful of skills, but it will certainly earn you some credit amongst your fellow Trekkies.
Although it’s a fictional language, there are apparently dozens of people who can actually converse in Klingon.
“It’s commonly estimated that there are around 30-50 people who are conversationally fluent, but hundreds who can communicate clearly through text; perhaps a thousand if they’re allowed occasional use of a dictionary and prefix chart,” Felix Malmenbeck, creator of the Duolingo Klingon course, told VentureBeat.
According to the company, there have been 170,000 pre-registrations for the course, so apparently a lot of people are interested in joining the ranks of the precious few who are fluent in the language. The course is free, but if you have a Duolingo Plus subscription, you can get the experience without ads and also use it while offline.
There’s even a Klingon Language Institute, which is dedicated to promoting and supporting the language. If you get good enough at Klingon and want a chance to test your skills, the organization will be hosting its 25th annual Meeting of the Klingon Language Institute from July 19-21 in Indianapolis. There will be classes, certification tests, games, stories and poetry.
What do you think? Would you boldly go where not that many have gone before and learn to speak Klingon?
[h/t: Mentalfloss]