As many of you know, I moved from the United States to the Netherlands (which is my birth country but not my native language) in 2021 after studying D

cohost! - "One Year As One Of The Top Competitive Duolingo Players On Earth (I Am Going Out In A Blaze Of Glory)"

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2023-05-21 16:00:08

As many of you know, I moved from the United States to the Netherlands (which is my birth country but not my native language) in 2021 after studying Dutch at home. I found getting over the initial hump of learning a second language very difficult and had several false starts over several years until I hit on the method of hand-copying the Dutch edition of an entire novel that I already knew well in English: not just reading but writing by hand into a notebook (a stack of about twelve notebooks by the end) because this was the right pace to think word-by-word. This finally burned the core vocabulary and grammatical patterns into my mind and my progress became much more rapid. My speaking abilities are still very lackluster (partly because I have auditory processing issues and can't hear a !@#$ thing clearly) but my ability to understand written Dutch verges on fluent. In fact it got to the point that I found myself thinking: "Didn't I want to learn Italian too?"

This thought kept recurring to me until I suddenly said to myself: "why not just get on with it?" and I installed Duolingo.

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