What is Mightyverse?
At it’s core, Mightyverse is a community-produced, collection of videos of people speaking phrases in their native voices. Right now, to add phrases to Mightyverse we’re using off-line tools that are in the hands of a small group of passionate language enthusiasts. We plan to make it easy for anyone to add new phrases and recordings from the desktop web and mobile devices.

I am a passionate language enthusiast, can I contribute to Mightyverse?
Yes! Right now our recording and editing tools are under development and in use by a core community. If you’d like to record, edit, or annotate existing content, send us a note and tell us about what you are interested in.

When will Mightyverse support my language?
We add languages when we have one or more people committed to recording a collection of phrases in that language into the database. If you want to be one of these people, let us know!

What is the mission of Mightyverse?
We believe that it’s a sign of respect to speak someone else’s language and that being able to communicate with anyone you meet should be a basic human right. 80% of the world speaks only 83 languages, which is only 1.1% of the world’s languages. Most of our effort will be devoted to the most popular languages. However, we also want to help speakers of the remaining culturally vital languages to retain and share their heritage. It’s estimated that a human language disappears from use every 3 weeks, and we believe that Mightyverse can make a difference in keeping languages alive and vital through documentation and active use.

How would I use Mightyverse?
Right now you can browse phrases and phrase lists by language on our website.
You can use these phrases for learning a language or for simple communication needs while interacting with people you meet. You can also download a few sample Mightyverse phrase list apps to your iPhone or iPad to get a glimpse of how we imagine Mightyverse could be used out in the world.

Why video? Isn’t that a waste of bandwidth and resources?
Mightyverse is built on the premise that seeing is almost as important for language learning as hearing. Babies learn languages by carefully studying the faces of people they are listening to. People who are non-native speakers of a language have much higher comprehension while viewing the person talking. There is actually a part of the brain dedicated to face recognition that is triggered while viewing faces and key to how we process language. The face has an extraordinary number of muscles which are hardwired to express emotions and nuance, that are triggered into a dizzying array of expressions. These have been documented and coded by Dr. Paul Eckman in FACE. Also, from an aesthetic point of view, we feel like the visuals of the faces in Mightyverse add a warmth and a humanity that is essential for documentation of languages and a vital part of what makes Mightyverse a human experience.

Is Mightyverse available for my Android phone? (BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Playstation Portable, Wii….)
Well, right now we have a few apps optimized for the iPhone and iPad. They include a small sampling of the content on our site. We believe that Mightyverse needs to be available on mobile devices so it is with you whenever you need and wherever you are. Have a device or use case for Mightyverse that you’d like to see? Drop us a line!