{"id":5010,"date":"2020-02-17T10:29:07","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T09:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/?p=5010"},"modified":"2020-02-17T10:29:09","modified_gmt":"2020-02-17T09:29:09","slug":"its-my-duoversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/its-my-duoversary\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s my Duoversary"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n

A year ago today I signed up to Duolingo<\/a> and started studying German on a daily basis, and occasionally played with other languages. I complimented this with listening to podcasts in German almost daily and making other attempts to learn languages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went from trying to get fifty experience points a day per day for months before a conference broke my streak as I was too exhausted by the end of the day to continue learning. Life got in the way. It was more important to spend time with people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then I have kept up the streak for what will be my one hundred and sixty-first day in a row when I complete a lesson today. My goal is ten XP per day, i.e. one lesson but some days I get to one hundred XP and other days I do the bare minimum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every so often I hit walls. I want to study and I want to progress further but I just feel lost and just keep making mistakes. It’s at moments like this that I revise what I have already learned, in the hope that with consolidation I make progress sooner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was in Spain over December I took a break from studying German to study Spanish. You might as well study the language of the country where you are at that moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After a year of practice, I have learned a theoretical 1600 words but I still feel like a beginner. The app is great at getting you to learn specific words and phrases but it is of limited utility to learn a language properly. First I was going lesson by lesson until I got to five stars before moving to the next and then, before I hit the wall I tried lessons up to level one before moving on and that’s when I hit a learning wall. I struggled with phrasing and word order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the plus side, I can understand more and more as I listen to news podcasts although the percentage of words I understand still needs to go up before I can understand half of what they’re saying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I took online tests to see what my German level was I am still classed as a beginner and it is frustrating after a year of effort. If I had continued with doing five lessons a day then I’d be further along. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It isn’t the first time that I try to learn German. As a teenager, I had German lessons but I found the teaching method was boring compared to how Spanish was taught. I was given extra English lessons instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This second attempt at learning German is going better but I feel that I should work to make more progress. After a year of effort, I should be further along. In two or three weeks I’ll be taking formal lessons and expect smoother progress. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>A year ago today I signed up to Duolingo and started studying German on a daily basis, and occasionally played with other languages. I complimented this with listening to podcasts in German almost daily and making other attempts to learn languages. I went from trying to get fifty experience points a day per day for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"It's my Duoversary - One year of learning languages with Duolingo. ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1091],"tags":[1092,1093,1141],"class_list":["post-5010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language-learning","tag-duolingo","tag-language","tag-online-learning"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}