overall model /db design comments sought

Hi there,

Im wondering how to best go about this and would appreciate some general pointers etc.

Background: just a language learning site where users can can write posts both in their native language and the language they are learning. Users can view all the posts that are in their native language or the ones in the langauge they are learning.

I know i need a user and post models but do I also need a language one?

A user has many posts and a post belongs to a language A language has many posts is that right?

Should i be creating a relationhip between the language model and the user? A user has a *native* language A user has a *foreign* language

It doesnt sound right to me plus i dont even know how I could technically set that up as thats two "has a" to the same language model.

Instead I thought in my user objects Ill have two attributes, native language and foreign languge. When they write a post theyll specify if its in their native or foreign language. Then Controller->post>create will take that option and do something like

@sentence = @user.post.build(params[:post])

How is the above app design???

Should i be creating a relationhip between the language model and the user? A user has a *native* language A user has a *foreign* language

Hmm... could be a model question right there?

Users can have many foreign tongues (if I speak perhaps English, French, German and Russian)

Arguably, users can have multiple 'native' tongues... it depends on their frequency of usage I think.

So perhaps the distinction between native and foreign is a question of command of a particular language, which you could measure in some gradient (1 = Just learning, 10 = Expert) that the user would choose if you wanted users to be able to self-qualify their expertise.