Cornelius' Meditations

For the first half of the month, I have been busy preparing for an exam, which required me to fly to a different city, and several job interviews. For the second half, I came back on campus, packing up and shipping a lot of my stuff back home, because I am graduating and I used to have a hoarding issue (but that’s for a different post). All this is to say, I may or may not have forgotten to take care of myself, physically and mentally. So, when I opened up Duolingo the other day, I was not surprised to find out that I had lost my Duolingo streak after 336 days. I had just been way too busy to open up the app, despite the fact that its icon is at the most visible spot on my home screen.

Then I decided: this is a moment I should celebrate. And there is no other better way to do so than writing a blog post reviewing the app and my experience with it. So here it is.

I first downloaded Duolingo during quarantine. I was learning French at the time, and heard about this language learning app that everyone was talking about. I could read fairly well at the time, and have already familiarized myself with all the basic grammar structures in French, so Duolingo was not of great help. I kept using it out of curiosity. And it was fun. I liked how the app gamified language learning experience, which, I have to admit as a language learner myself for years, was never the most exciting thing you could expect from life. I stormed through about a ¼ of the entire course, but later found it boring because sometimes I would have to repeat answering the same question over and over again. Progress was slow. I lost patience and uninstalled the app. I think I had a 100-dayish streak and that was it.

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