Deutschelingo Trial

For the past few weeks, I've been doing Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.  I've only been doing a few minutes a day, aiming for just ten experience points instead of fifty (mitigating the risk of burning out).  For the most part, I am happy with the progress I've made.  It's mostly been a refresher on what I've learned so far, but I do feel more comfortable with talking and translating.  My "fluency" is back up to 37%, about where it was before I stopped.  I intend to press on and see what I can learn.

Before the idea of speaking Spanish even popped into my mind, I took German in high school and I was pretty good at it.  I took it for two semesters and I made all A's.  I even found myself practicing German by translating songs from English (eg: Blue (Da-Ba-Dee) by Eiffel 65).  However, college happened and I stopped doing German altogether.  I don't remember the language being offered at Lord Fairfax at the time...or if it was, I couldn't fit it into my schedule.  Instead, I picked up Spanish a couple of years in and the rest of that is history (in the making).

A few days ago, my boss was texting her son and asked me if I knew German.  I said, "Ein kleine" (a little).  She asked me to translate "no" in German.  To which, I could (ie: "nein").  All the same, this got me wondering how well my German held up over the past fourteen years.  I logged onto Duolingo, started their German course, and I jumped right in and took their placement test.  While I wasn't as confident with German as I am with Spanish, I thought I'd do okay because I did really well in high school.  The result: ... I suck at German.

The few questions I did get right were only because I remembered that all nouns in German are capitalized.  Otherwise, I would never have gotten "the dog drinks the milk".  I also missed a lot of articles for their proper nouns (Der, Die, Das).  Lastly when I asked for a slower demonstration of the audio, the sound byte sounded angrier, which was jarring and, admittedly, kind of funny at the same time.  About halfway through the test and a few minutes of getting the questions wrong, the app crashed on my tablet!  I guess even my RCA was tired of me destroying the sister language of English.

Later that day, I logged back on.  It gave me the option to do the placement test again.  To which, I said "no" and elected to start from scratch.  Likewise with Spanish, I opted to do only ten experience points.  After the lesson, I felt pretty good.  I know I'm not as good at German as I was, so but I think I can get back up to high school proficiency with some work (kind of curious to see where I would have landed on Duolingo's "fluency" rating).  I am still taking Spanish and will do so alongside German for a total of twenty experience points a day.

The saying "if you don't use it, you lose it" is true with languages.  A lot can disappear in fourteen years.  However, I think this is something I want to try and bring back.  I don't know how practical learning German will be, especially when speaking Spanish is a great skill to have when job hunting in the United States, but I want to do this for me.  German was a big part of my high school identity (academically speaking) and I'd like to try and preserve that.  Maybe my tablet will be less testy with me as I do this as well.