Alright, full disclosure, I can't actually read that title in full yet, I had to use Google translate.
In 6th Grade I took Finnish, didn't learn a damn lick of it. Now if that was because I didn't care, or because i'm Lazy or just plain stupid I couldn't tell you. It was a long time ago. Looking back all I can say for sure is even if I had become fluent I'm not sure what good it would have done me.
Spanish on the other hand is a whole other story. More frequently I'm hearing people speak Spanish and I while I won't bother to find a stat (because I'm sure I could find 20 different conflicting stats) there is more and more Spanish speakers in America and being able to communicate is a good thing on many levels, plus when there is a group of Latino ladies giggling and glancing I won't feel like I'm being talked about, Ill know it ;).
Jokes aside I had decided a while Back that I should learn Spanish but Rossetta stone was cost prohibitive and the program that my local library gave me access to was buggy and relied on voice recognition that couldn't interpret my poor pronunciation so I looked at the various free apps on Google play. I was real lucky the first app I tried was duolingo (curiously spelled with a lower case d.) The app is easy to use, Lets you move at your own pace and best of all is even fun. Within a few days I started to feel like I was making real progress and my kids had even got in on the learning.
Now in the car rather than playing the million and first game of twenty questions or eye spy one of us opens the app and reads the questions out loud and we sorta compete at answering the them.
My kids seem to be picking it up even faster than I am and my 13 year old sees it as a game that will result in an easy A if he takes a Spanish class in High school.
I'm only a few weeks into using duolingo so obviously this is kind of an "early look" review but I would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a new language or even any one who is sick of playing silly games (I'm looking at you candy crap crush) to kill time on the bus or in line at the bank when they could be using that same time and device to learn a new skill. Everybody has those small chunks of time in the day waiting for something, and usually that time is long enough to start on an important task so it just goes to waste. this is a great way to make that time count for something instead of wasting it.
I give duolingo a tenative 9 Sexy Latino chicks making fun of my flat butt out of ten.
No comments:
Post a Comment