I'm not sure I would go *that* far.
Photo: Mitch Teich
Jan 22, 2022 —
You might have missed the moment when it happened.
It was around 11:30 in the evening, and I asked how much the coffee cost. I didn’t get an answer, but my phone played a fanfare, which was really the response I was looking for. And with that, the odometer on my Duolingo app rolled over to 1825 days.
Duolingo, if you’re not acquainted, is a language learning app. And 1825 days, if your math is as slow as mine, is five years. I’ve spent a few minutes dusting off my foreign language skills every day since January of 2017.
It started with practicing my French, under the misguided belief that I could keep up with my daughter, who was studying French using a little technique called “school.” I, too, had taken French in my school days – six years’ worth, spanning the gamut of 1980s French instruction, from confidently expressing that my name is Mitch, to learning the days of the week, to reading L’Etranger with marginal comprehension. For example, I could understand if one of the characters introduced himself on a Wednesday. To me, that seemed like the shortcoming to school language instruction in those days – we never knew whether we were learning French to order crêpes, or so that we could read early 20th Century literature.
But by 2017, I could no longer even count on my introductory skills, and would have been in big trouble if I had been cornered in an alley by thugs who demanded that I translate Camus for them. So I hopped on the Duolingo train, and before you could say bibliotheque, my then-seventh grade daughter could talk to me in patronizingly short words.
But I kept it up, and gradually picked up some useful words and phrases, just enough to chaperone an eighth grade trip to French language camp in Minnesota, and then foolishly decline the damage waiver at the rental car counter at Charles de Gaulle Airport a few months later. And before you knew it, I moved to a place just a half-hour from the Quebec border, where knowing French could be a regularly useful skill.
And so I switched to German.
My daughter, having gotten well beyond the point of personal introductions and days of the week in French, had decided that she could someday become ambassador to Switzerland, so she added German to her skill set, progressing quickly enough that she can now correct the subtitles on disturbing German dramas on Netflix. My wife had taken German in high school, and so I was facing the real possibility that I would soon no longer understand the women in my household, both metaphorically and literally.
A few hundred days of Duolingo later, I can order coffee from an imaginary barista on an app, tell our dog to get on with her business already (Lass uns gehen, Muesli, es ist kalt!), and understand many of the lyrics in German pop songs, if not always the context. (Yes, but why do the singers believe the best is yet to come?). It hasn’t been amazingly practical, but it has been fun to pick up a language from das Erdgeschoss – er, the ground floor.
Moreover, I work in the media business, emailing public radio colleagues, writing a column, or interviewing musicians every day. And so the act of spending a few minutes each day deliberately thinking about the skill of language has been time well-spent.
So I’m keeping up my Duolingo streak, even if I’m only on Level 3 of “Dining Out” and Level 2 of “Health.” My wife and daughter still have plenty of ways of communicating without my understanding.
But I have reason for hope. My son started French this year.
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