Saturday, October 19, 2013

Nine months of Spanish

I think that I started with Duolingo.com  in February of 2013, so it's roughly nine months of learning now.

Sometime along the way I also started doing Coffee Break Spanish. Because I was well along in Duolingo, I let that slide for a few months while I caught up to it.  I'm now roughly even in both places so can go forward equally.

That lapse of Duolingo turned out to have a benefit.  I was starting to feel a bit discouraged with my progress.  It wasn't that I hadn't learned anything, but I didn't feel that I had learned all that much and was annoyed that I am still struggling along, usually unable to follow a spoken conversation at all and not doing much better with written text.

I just didn't feel like I had gained much.

But when you stay away from Duolingo, it wants you to refresh your skills.  I was so long in catching up that it took me right back to the beginning for review and practice.  That's where I was able to truly appreciate how much I have learned:  the review was easy.  I am still working through the levels to catch up, but I have been clipping right along, snapping off translations in either direction with ease and (this surprised me) having no problem with the listening exercises too!

If this had been a graded test, I think I would have easily had an A.  Even the mistakes I made were mostly from carelessness and haste rather than lack of understanding, so I feel pretty good about that.  So, yes, I'm a long, long way from the fluency I would like to have, but I also have learned much more than I thought.

I'm happy :-)


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