{"id":15477,"date":"2017-02-17T09:44:30","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T17:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2017\/02\/17\/15477.html"},"modified":"2017-02-17T09:44:30","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T17:44:30","slug":"duolingo-spanish-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2017\/02\/17\/duolingo-spanish-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Duolingo Spanish progress update"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Every so often as I go through Duolingo Spanish lessons, I hit a wall.<\/p>\n

Right at the start, for example, I had some trouble with present-tense verb endings for first\/second\/third person. But once I got that (mostly by remembering Latin amo\/amas\/amat and dropping the final t from amat), it was pretty smooth sailing for a while.<\/p>\n

Then I reached a point where a lot of the new vocabulary consisted of words that didn't have obvious English cognates (and that I hadn't learned by osmosis growing up in California), so I was having trouble learning them. But I eventually got through that part of the tree too, partly by looking up etymology in Wiktionary. And then everything was good for a while, and I was feeling like I had a pretty good handle on this Spanish thing and it was mostly just a matter of expanding my vocabulary.<\/p>\n

And then I hit object pronouns and reflexive verbs, and was completely at a loss.<\/p>\n

After days of struggling with that and getting almost everything wrong, I started to write up my conceptual confusion in the form of a plaintive query to post somewhere asking for help, but somehow halfway through writing that up, something clicked. And I followed a Duolingo-discussion-page link to a useful page about reflexive verbs and pronouns<\/a>, and it all started to make sense, though I'm still not great at remembering which pronouns to use where and which verbs are reflexive.<\/p>\n

So I moved on, but before I could get back up to full confidence, I plowed headlong into past tense, which is not only introducing a bunch of new verb endings, but also a bunch of new verbs, most of them without obvious English cognates. I went through that lesson very slowly, and will be going through it again soon to try to remember more of it. (I keep trying to remind myself that a lot of what I do know is due to repetition; I don't have to learn everything on first exposure to it.)<\/p>\n

And I'm still less than halfway through the full Duolingo skill tree, which I suspect means that there's a lot more hard stuff yet to come.<\/p>\n

But on the plus side, I've done at least a little Duolingo almost every day this year. And it says that my Spanish fluency is at “49%,” which on the one hand is ridiculous (I'm nowhere near halfway fluent, not even in reading, much less in writing or hearing or speaking) but on the other hand, I can read a lot more of things like bus ads in Spanish than I used to be able to.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I doubt I'll ever be really fluent, but I'm very pleased that Duolingo provides such a useful and me-compatible service. (My goal from the start has been to learn a little more Spanish, rather than to become fully fluent, and by that measure I'm succeeding.) And I hope to continue to, very gradually, get through the harder parts.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every so often as I go through Duolingo Spanish lessons, I hit a wall. Right at the start, for example,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[113,12,29,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-language","category-life-updates","category-self-improvement"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}