a.k.a. V.J.

A few months ago, I wrote about how I could not bring myself to end my continuous-days streak on the Duolingo app. I’m proud to report that upon hitting the milestone of 731 days (two years plus one day), I disabled all of the notifications on the app and am finally taking a break from it. Weirdly enough, I’m more proud of myself for quitting than I am of spending two years learning Latin and German.

I’ll go back to using Duolingo at some point — maybe even soon — but I’m done with letting myself getting sucked into chasing gamification goals like streaks and achievement levels. Also, I’m never re-activating the harassing reminder notifications; they are truly the road to madness.

All joking aside, all that time I spent with the green owl was mostly a positive experience. At the very least, it was a better use of my time than playing mobile games or scrolling through social-media feeds. It was also a good reminder of the power of incrementalism. I rarely spent more than five to ten minutes in any given day on the app, but after two years of daily repetition, I am noticeably better at German. When I was in Germany back in 2016, I remembered enough of my high school and college German to order at restaurants and decipher the signs at train stations, but that was about it. Now I feel like I could hold my own in a basic conversation with a native speaker — assuming that they were patient with me.

And as for my brief foray into Latin? Well, I pretty much topped out at Psittacos illos igne deleo.