Streaky Serpent
30/03/2024 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIzzie has been absent from this book of Cyberia for what seems like centuries.
But today the counter ticked over at Duolingo & I got the magic 2500 day streak. It doesn't look so pretty expressed in proper Muggle time which is just over 6 years and 6 months.
When I signed up way back in February 2017, Petunia was still alive but not so well. I remember often doing lessons while waiting for the bus at the hospital.
It's so strange. So much of my life has changed so dramatically over that time. Duo was sort of a constant during all the chaos.
The evil green bird used to constantly ask me to up my daily minimum of just one measly lesson to something a bit more serious.
I always declined. It turned out I was inadvertently using the one push up strategy of habit creation.
I started with a habit so tiny that it was almost effortless to complete. Even as a complete newbie.
At one point I was so brain dead that I spent almost a whole year just doing stories to meet my daily quota.
Of course that lazy option got nuked when the evil green owl razed the orchards filled with a those lovely golden apples and replaced all those lovely colourful fruit trees with a very boring road instead.
Last year when my sister was here, I had the inspired idea of adding German for Russian speakers because Russian for German speakers was not an option.
Rather amusing considering I was learning Russian when living in Germany & German was the language used for teaching.
I then spiced it up with Spanish for Russian speakers and Russian for Spanish speakers.
It's a lot less scary than the nuclear option of changing your smart phone settings to a target language.
Part of the reason was curiosity. Especially how to explain the distinctions between Ser & Estar to learners who hardly ever use a verb for to be'
But as I discovered a while back, Duolingo has definitely gone all minimalist on grammatical explanations.
They also shut down the very useful & often amusing discussion forums around the time that Russia invaded Ukraine.
In spite of that, it's still a good app for listening, hearing, making the tedious but necessary repetition fun and basically catering to the right brain aspects of language learning.
I added music as soon as it became available.
I'm old enough to remember how ridiculously expensive it used to be to learn either languages or music.
Now I can do it for free with much better teachers.
Same thing's also happened with international phone calls.
Vastly cheaper and more convenient with much better quality too.
So not everything new is the work of the Devil.
But today the counter ticked over at Duolingo & I got the magic 2500 day streak. It doesn't look so pretty expressed in proper Muggle time which is just over 6 years and 6 months.
When I signed up way back in February 2017, Petunia was still alive but not so well. I remember often doing lessons while waiting for the bus at the hospital.
It's so strange. So much of my life has changed so dramatically over that time. Duo was sort of a constant during all the chaos.
The evil green bird used to constantly ask me to up my daily minimum of just one measly lesson to something a bit more serious.
I always declined. It turned out I was inadvertently using the one push up strategy of habit creation.
I started with a habit so tiny that it was almost effortless to complete. Even as a complete newbie.
At one point I was so brain dead that I spent almost a whole year just doing stories to meet my daily quota.
Of course that lazy option got nuked when the evil green owl razed the orchards filled with a those lovely golden apples and replaced all those lovely colourful fruit trees with a very boring road instead.
Last year when my sister was here, I had the inspired idea of adding German for Russian speakers because Russian for German speakers was not an option.
Rather amusing considering I was learning Russian when living in Germany & German was the language used for teaching.
I then spiced it up with Spanish for Russian speakers and Russian for Spanish speakers.
It's a lot less scary than the nuclear option of changing your smart phone settings to a target language.
Part of the reason was curiosity. Especially how to explain the distinctions between Ser & Estar to learners who hardly ever use a verb for to be'
But as I discovered a while back, Duolingo has definitely gone all minimalist on grammatical explanations.
They also shut down the very useful & often amusing discussion forums around the time that Russia invaded Ukraine.
In spite of that, it's still a good app for listening, hearing, making the tedious but necessary repetition fun and basically catering to the right brain aspects of language learning.
I added music as soon as it became available.
I'm old enough to remember how ridiculously expensive it used to be to learn either languages or music.
Now I can do it for free with much better teachers.
Same thing's also happened with international phone calls.
Vastly cheaper and more convenient with much better quality too.
So not everything new is the work of the Devil.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 12:16 pm (UTC)I still miss free Coursera... the courses were the best. I guess it's sort of feasible to buy the yearly subscription, but it requires a lot of dedication to make it worthwhile.
Musical chairs
Date: 2024-04-01 02:33 pm (UTC)I began checking every other week since then but had to wait until mid February before it finally turned up on my Plan B phone.
It's pretty basic. A keyboard with only 7 white keys starring at C and the lessons mainly involve learning where the notes are on the keyboard and reading music.
It's plenty to keep me happy and is so very different from anything I've tried learning before.
It didn't take too long to get stuck in the quicksand because apart from C & B, the other notes have the bad habit of looking just too much like each other except location.
I usually get stuck because I can't keep up. I take too long to recognise most of the notes.
Also, I still can't link a particular written note to its sound the way that I automatically link a letter of the alphabet to its usual corresponding sound.
It's strange because I often only need to hear 3 notes of a song on the radio to recognise it. I pick up on intros very quickly so I must have some subconscious means of anchoring them to the relevant song.
I've pretty much given up on MOOCs. Not just that they are a lot more expensive but I just don't have the attention span I used to.
But I still indulge in nostalgia for the Golden Age (for me) of 2012 to 2016.