Learning
asturianu.org was born to fill a gap: there was no free place to train for the official Asturian language certifications without paying for it or handing over your data. It's a portal built for anyone who wants to learn or strengthen their level of the language, with exercises similar to the real exams.
Before asturianu.org, learning Asturian on your own was a road without a map. There were scattered materials — Academy grammars, course notes, isolated videos — but no single place that gathered the whole journey: from your first «bones tardes» to sitting the official certification exam. Anyone wanting to prepare for an A2, B2 or C1 exam had to make do with scattered resources, paid materials, or in-person academies that weren't always accessible if you didn't live in a large city.
The project was born from that gap: if Asturian is a living language, the path to learning and certifying it has to be as open as the language itself. That's why asturianu.org chose, from day one, a model radically different from most learning platforms: free forever, no trackers, and no need to pay to practise.
The portal's structure answers a simple idea, rarely applied with rigour: learning a language isn't reading a grammar book, it's building a progressive path from passive knowledge to active use. Asturianu.org organises that path into four connected stages:
Learn. Clear grammar itineraries and explanations, designed for absolute beginners. This isn't an academic grammar simply transcribed — it's material built specifically for learning, with pedagogical progression and real examples of everyday language use.
Practise. A campus with interactive exercises and simulations that give instant feedback. The philosophy here is clear: feedback has to be immediate and explain the why, not just mark right or wrong. Exercises use real words and expressions — not textbook phrases without context — and the review system prioritises whatever each person struggles with most, instead of a generic review identical for everyone.
Prepare. Simulations identical to the real format of the official exams from the Principality of Asturias' Education Department: comprehension, grammar, writing and oral, across four levels (A2, B2, C1, with C2 in development). This isn't a generic exam adapted after the fact — it's a faithful replica of the real structure, timing and marking criteria, so anyone sitting the official exam already knows the terrain before walking into the room.
Speak. The endpoint of this path isn't passing an exam, it's using the language. Asturianu.org links to an open community that shares, celebrates every step and keeps evolving alongside the portal itself — a blog, projects in Asturian, useful links, and an FAQ space for specific doubts.
One of the portal's most distinctive features is the daily crossword in Asturian: a new puzzle every day, free, with no sign-up and no cookies, built for learning vocabulary while playing. It's not a decorative add-on — it's a practical demonstration of the project's philosophy: learning works best as a light, enjoyable routine, not a heavy obligation. Coming back to the crossword every day is, almost by accident, coming back to the language every day.
This idea of «sober gamification» — play without dependency, practice without pressure — repeats throughout the campus exercises: every question is designed so that the person answering cares about the answer, not so the platform keeps them engaged as long as possible. It's a subtle but crucial difference from many language-learning apps that prioritise engagement over actual progress.
Deciding not to charge for learning Asturian isn't naive: it costs money to keep servers running, produce new content and keep expanding the campus. But asturianu.org rejects both usual routes for funding a "free" service — advertising and selling personal data — and chooses instead a voluntary, transparent funding model:
Donations are one-off, with no subscription or mandatory sign-up: anyone who wants to contribute gives what they want, whenever they want. Every contribution pays for servers and new materials, and the portal is explicit about where that money goes. Merchandise — hoodies, caps, mugs branded with the project, print-on-demand — is the other leg: wearing the language is also sustaining the project.
This model implies a deeper decision: no trackers, no behavioural analytics, no advertising profiling. Sustainability comes from those who use the service and choose to support it, not from selling their attention or data to third parties. It's the same principle that governs Xiringase as a whole — privacy isn't a hidden option in a menu, it's the system's natural state.
Asturianu.org isn't a closed product to be "consumed": it presents itself explicitly as a community project, driven by Xiringase but open to anyone wanting to contribute, correct, expand or suggest improvements. Content is published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike), which guarantees the material can be freely reused and adapted, provided it's not for commercial purposes and the same open licence carries over to the result.
This openness has a concrete linguistic reason: Asturian doesn't have a large publishing ecosystem behind it, and any resource offering quality, freely reusable educational material directly expands the corpus available to the community. The more open material exists, the easier it is for other projects, teachers or self-learners to keep building on top of it, instead of repeating the same work from scratch.
All of asturianu.org's content follows the standards set by the Academia de
la Llingua Asturiana (ALLA), the same normative authority that governs
Xiringase's Asturian voice (see linguist, backed by LLEXA, an engine built
on the DALLA dictionary). This isn't a minor detail: many "learn Asturian"
resources circulating online mix unmarked dialectal forms, unidentified
Spanish loanwords, or forms that wouldn't survive rigorous normative review.
Asturianu.org instead offers a path to learning the language correctly,
not just an informal approximation.
This page exists because Xiringase understands that its editorial work isn't limited to publishing its own content — it also means giving visibility and context to house projects that only live outside the main domain. asturianu.org is, together with tever.es and La Vieya Asturies, one of the three real entities in Xiringase's editorial catalogue, and this feature is the expanded profile that brings together the home page's short card with the concrete facts that define the project: what it offers, how it sustains itself, and what language it speaks.
