It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’ve been plugging away at Swedish. Mostly, I’ve become obsessed with completing the Swedish tree on Duolingo and that takes up all my Swedish time and mental energy. It is exhausting trying to finish all the lessons and do the review, but more about that later.
I did pretty well on my Swedish mini-goals for March, although not perfect:
- Duolingo – My goal was to reach level 10/checkpoint two. By the end of March, I got to level 11 and was well on my way to checkpoint three. I tell you, Duolingo took over my language learning life.
- Memrise – My goal was to complete Hacking Swedish. This…I didn’t do. I could have, too! I was very close to the end. But then I spent the times when I USED to do Memrise, reviewing Duolingo lessons instead, chasing that elusive all-gold tree. Memrise is supposed to incentivize you to keep going with its point system and its growing/wilting flowers. But that is apparently not enough to hook me. I don’t care if my flowers die! But I do care if my Duolingo tree is all burnished gold. I actually haven’t been on Memrise since mid-March, but I plan to go back to it in May after the stupid Duolingo tree is finally, finally done.
- Write & speak simple sentences – My goal was to write at least three complete sentences to the Daily Language thread on the Duolingo subreddit. I did this! It felt amazing. I wrote ridiculously simple sentences (the topic: pets), but it was thrilling to express myself in Swedish in a public forum.
- Sing “Kiss the Girl” – I was not brave enough to sing even to my cat. But I did write down the lyrics and watch the video on repeat, sometimes muttering the words under my breath. Learning “Kiss the Girl” was excellent for my vocabulary – besides learning “to kiss” (kysser), I also learned words such as “word” (ord), “need” (behover), and “should” (borde). And if I ever find myself a bystander in some real-life romcom, I can yell at the main couple, “Ta en kyss!” (take a kiss), and watch them make out as everyone around them claps and cheers the fact they finally got together.
I haven’t made any new goals for April except to finish the soul-consuming Duolingo tree. Everything else is kind of on hold until then.
The thing is, at this point I’m not even sure how much vocabulary/grammar I’m picking up from Duolingo. I can complete a lesson without having to memorize or learn much of anything – I just use all the hints and fake it through. Up until about a week and a half ago, I was doing enough review lessons to keep my tree golden, which was what was helping me remember the words. But by the time I was halfway through the third checkpoint, trying to keep the tree gold had become a fool’s game. I was doing 10 -15 review lessons a day, and I still couldn’t keep up with the lessons that were “decaying” and ungilding. So I’ve given up on keeping the tree gold for now and am bolting for the end. I expect to finish it this week.
I don’t know why I have such an obsessive need to complete the tree. I’ve completed a Duolingo tree before (French) and it was painfully underwhelming. I expected a gif of fireworks or Duo the owl dancing or something. Heck, back in the ’90s, the Windows solitaire computer game had the cards jump out and bounce across the screen when you won a game. No matter how many times I won, I felt the happy glow of accomplishment watching the cards bounce around. Duolingo just gives you a golden statute. It’s a little sad that a card game from the ’90s has a more exciting celebration of victory.
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