Breton, Dutch and QOL updates! WNWL #12

Hello everyone and welcome back to what’s new with Lingonaut! We’ll skip the preamble and get right to the updates!

New, more responsive Management

You most likely know me as Dr. Greenboys or as the current Project Lead but I essentially have been the creator and lead of The Lingonaut Project. Unfortunately I’ll be stepping back for a bit due to some health issues (which is why we’ve been quite sporadic in updates), but have no fear!

Our trusted and highly passionate Jack (also known as Jack Midnightpaw!) will be taking over the Project for the time being. He’s highly motivated and qualified and I have no doubt Jack will bring the project to new highs!

Now onwards to the announcements:

Breton and Dutch now available

At long last, and with a massive thank you to the teams working on each language, we can announce that Breton and Dutch are coming to Lingonaut!

These courses cover the first few skills, and will be added to over time. You can find it in the Language selection menus of Lingonaut

It’s been thoroughly checked for errors and is completable from start to finish. We can’t wait for you to try it and as always if you encounter issues or bugs, you can let us know by tapping the bug icon and sending us the unique question ID.

We’re really happy to get it out into the wild and I know there’s been lots of Lingonauts waiting for it as well. Thank you for your patience.

These will be the last courses released at the same time for Patrons & Non-Patrons. We always promised patrons early access to courses and content updates from very early on and as costs rise we have to make good on our promises.

The Dutch course is credited to: catgrrl, Maaike, Skye, Quinn, anwime, Baku, lagg_mine, Chester, asdf
The Breton course is credited to: Chan, Ijin Lusk, RataVoloira

Klingon and Welsh get new updates

A massive thank you to the teams working on Klingon and Welsh for continuing to work on the new courses and providing us all with updated courses.

The updated courses will be prompted for you to download next time you launch Lingonaut and include vocabulary and sentence fixes, as well as new skills and content depending on the course.

The Klingon course is credited to: stormcrow5819
The Welsh course update is credited to: Dewilingo, RataVoloira

Hello, GrapheneOS and /e/OS users!

After a lot of feedback on Discord and the Reddit about supporting phones that don’t come with google play out of the box, and we can finally say that now GrapheneOS and /e/OS are both supported by Lingonaut!

They were originally excluded as part of our anti-cheat ‘swiss-cheese’ model but clearly there is a large overlap between Lingonaut users and GrapheneOS users (for obvious reasons), and we needed to find a way to preserve the integrity of the social features as well as allow non-standard Android learners to use Lingonaut!

Therefore we have added a fallback from Google Play attestation to Hardware attestation, allowing us to verify Lingonaut isn’t being run from an emulator where its internal workings can be exposed and tampered with.

Google Play attestation verifies that an app is genuine, installed through an approved channel, and running on a device that meets Google’s integrity requirements. Hardware attestation uses your phone’s enclave to prove that its real without needing to phone home to google!

Other new features too

We’ve added a suite of new improvements, with particular focus on things to aid the Translatonaut community in creating and testing courses. The full changelogs can be found below:

Android

• Added Android system back button/gesture support during setup stages 3–9.
• Added hardware key attestation fallback for registration and profile updates.
• Kept Play Integrity as the default path, with hardware attestation fallback when unavailable or rejected.
• Added many new drawable/icon assets for lesson content.
• Removed invalid drawable/new.png, fixing Android resource merge/build failure.
• Added Klingon and Spanish to Android onboarding and language selection.
• Added compact onboarding layouts for smaller screens.
• Improved compact login/register screens for small Android devices.
• Improved Stage Three course selection spacing and title fitting.
• Improved Stage Six compact typography.
• Improved Stage Eight compact donation screen with scrolling/fading text.
• Fixed mascot correct-answer animation starting on the last frame.
• Improved PickWords layout so words use one row when possible, two rows when needed, and horizontal scrolling only when necessary.
• Made selected-word divider spacing consistent in PickWords.
• Added fresh profile fetch before profile writes to reduce overwriting newer server data.
• Replaced Android loading earth image.
• Removed automatic pin_earlybird and pin_build25 awards on registration.
• Hardened answer popup/question ID handling around appended instance IDs.
• Refactored PickOneMeaning parsing to use named fields instead of array positions.
• Added regression coverage for answer popup ID parsing.
• Added Dutch and Breton buttons to Language-Select and setup menus
• Can no longer continue lessons after getting 5 stars in their respective skill
• Added ability to completely reset lesson progress

iOS

• Added Klingon and Spanish to onboarding and language selection.
• Added Klingon flag/language mapping.
• Added many icon asset sets.
• Removed bundled Czech/German course/audio files from the repo, likely moving toward downloaded course content.
• Improved compact iPhone SE login/register layouts.
• Explicitly used white compact auth backgrounds for dark mode correctness.
• Replaced iOS loading earth image.
• Removed automatic pin_earlybird and pin_build25 awards on registration.
• Refactored PickOneMeaning to use named question parameters.
• Updated AnswerPopUpViews to read the answer field directly for PickOneMeaning.
• Added silent 5-second retry before showing registration failure.
• Fixed language/flag mappings and added Welsh/Italian earlier.
• Improved tiled background sizing.
• Improved tree/skill unlock logic to work by skill layers.
• Improved horizontally grouped tree skills with fallback scrolling.
• Rounded diamond skill buttons.
• Removed noisy AnswerPopup debug prints.
• Added Dutch and Breton buttons to Language-Select and setup menus
• Can no longer continue lessons after getting 5 stars in their respective skill
• Added ability to completely reset lesson progress

8000 iOS Lingonauts and over 3000 Android Lingonauts since the open Beta!

We’re both surprised and humbled at how quickly the registration filled up for both Open Betas and how high the adoption has been! I’m really glad you’re enjoying Lingonaut and learning as well as helping us improve it, add new languages and report bugs.

It wouldn’t have been possible without you all, thank you very very much!

Onwards and Upwards

We said the goal right now is to improve the quality of changes instead of just the quantity of changes, and I think with this update we’ve reached that goal.

For the next update we’re going to be adding that feature where you can tap on a word and it’ll give you the translation, Just like the other app. It should prove incredibly helpful to learners but shouldn’t take much more work from our translatonauts to implement. Plus, it’s been extremely frequently requested so we know you want it!

That’s all for now, we can’t wait to show what we have in store for next month!