Thursday, July 21, 2022

Big Famous Hat News re DuoLingo

 

Yesterday evening Travalon and I played tennis for about fifteen minutes, but not long enough (or maybe vigorously enough?) for my FitBit to record that we had done "sport." This evening we went to the health club for the first time in a long time and swam in the outdoor pool, and it was so wonderful that we wondered why we hadn't come sooner. Not only that, but my FitBit recorded that we swam for over half an hour. Then we went to the Mexican restaurant across the street to refuel. I said to Travalon that it was time I do something besides Irish on DuoLingo, maybe I should brush up on my Spanish, or should I do French? and to my surprise he said he loved to hear people speaking French. I never knew that about him, just like it was years before I knew he loved that hippie side of me. So this evening I took a chance and added French to my DuoLingo profile.

The first question DuoLingo asked me was if I knew any French, so I said yes, and it gave me a test. I only got one answer wrong, so it placed me in the third level. What does this mean? I have no idea, since I don't know how many levels of French there are. (There are five levels of Irish, and I have passed them all.) And what a difference! French DuoLingo is much more interesting than Irish DuoLingo - there are little stories you can listen to and then answer questions, and it makes you actually speak French, and then it judges your accent. I'm not here for anyone to judge my terrible accent in French, but surprisingly DuoLingo actually thought I was saying things correctly. I have never had to speak Irish to it! At one point I spelled the word for tea in the Irish way (tae) instead of the French way (the) (with an accent that I am too lazy to make), and DuoLingo just said I had a typo. Man, it dings me for the teeniest mistake in Irish, even when it really is just a typo! So I will explore French for a while, then I may try Spanish, and Portuguese, and Italian. Because honestly, it was getting kind of boring to answer the same old Irish questions over and over.


Famous Hat


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