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.
