600 Days on Duolingo

 

A few short notes on my continuing experience with Duolingo. As I have already mentioned, in January 2021, a bit on a whim, I started learning Spanish on Duolingo - just a couple of exercises a day initially, trying to keep my Spanish alive. Then, on October 1st, after my visit to Vienna, I included German. I had never studied any German before, so what I have learned during my almost full year of German on Duolingo now, is from scratch. 

There are many voices out there, that language platforms like Duolingo are a waste of time. Maybe, but compared to what? Paid professional courses or private tutors? Such activities require quite a lot of money, time, schedule. Learning on your own from textbooks and exercises books? I wonder how many have the required perseverance and determination. I know I don't - of all the challenges and nicely intended initiatives I've embarked over the year, Duolingo is the only one I have consistently stuck to, every day. So, yah, it might not be optimal, but it is something compared to the nothing I would have if I wasn't doggedly clutching to my streak and my Diamond league placement.

On the other hand, Duolingo per se is not enough, in my opinion. It does not provide a clear grammar frame and the repetition of phrases, containing words with changing endings without a clear understanding what is happening and why am I getting it constantly wrong is truly frustrating. My break through the language actually came, when I happened upon a structured 16 hour program of introduction into German on Youtube. The program was in Russian, but my passive Russian is good enough and my knowledge of Russian grammar, with its three noun genders and six cases actually helped a lot. To me, the intuitive learning of a language through examples, like children do, is, well, bullsh*t, that window closes once you are over puberty and even for children it does take a lot of years. The advantages adults have is their knowledge of grammar, how languages work and the more foreign languages you have experience with, the better. 

Once I finished that 16 hour program (twice), I bought a Grammar textbook and an exercise book, but in all honesty, I'm not very consistent with them - that only goes to show that I do need my Duolingo lessons. However, I continued and still do, enlarging my knowledge of the structure and rules of the language through Youtube lessons. I have also already read two books in German, constantly comparing the text with the Bulgarian translation of the books (I chose books I have in Bulgarian at home), I watch German language movies (not all the time, of course), from time to time I use Deutsche Welle and their exercises and tests.

So, after a year, I estimate my level at A2.1. Not much, but not nothing. How much time do I spend on Duolingo? I start with my morning coffee and it usually takes me an hour, lately I do exercises in the afternoon as well, if I have the time. So yes, it does take time. To compensate, I have almost entirely abandoned Instagram and Facebook and I don't miss it even a bit! And yes, I did have some withdrawal syndrome with FB in the beginning, I used to have it open on my desktop the entire time before and it makes me wonder now how addicted actually I was! I also do less crafting, but that is due not only to my German lessons, but also to a number of other factors (more work, less enthusiasm).

And finally, what about Spanish? Unfortunately, I had to abandon it for now. My Spanish was a beginner's level (I had A2.1) and it started messing with my German, I found that I just didn't have the capacity to remember so many words from two different languages, to observe different sentence structures, etc. It is enough that I study German through English on Duolingo and through English and Russian on Youtube (my mother tongue Bulgarian is of little use on the world scale, unfortunately), adding another new language in the mix turned unproductive.

What about my further plans? I intend to stick with Duolingo to the end, right now I am through half of the course and I plan on finishing it probably in a year or less. Meanwhile or afterwards I plan to sit for a Goethe Institute certificate - A2 or maybe directly B1. After I've gotten the B1 certificate and finished with Duolingo, I'm thinking of enrolling into a B2 course with Goethe Institute. My ambitions go as high as B2 and keeping it fresh through reading and writing from there on. But I'll think about crossing that bridge when I come to it :)