Learning Italian With DuoLingo

Should the death of the little green owl bother me?

Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash

I’ve been learning Italian using DuoLingo for a while now. My current streak is 628, which means I’ve been doing so for the better part of two years.

I have never been a natural linguist. The independent school in Hampstead I attended did not introduce modern languages before the age of 13 and when I moved, aged 14, to a grammar school in Sussex it was deemed too late for me to begin learning French.

So I began a two-year course, preparing for German O-Levels, as they were then. I didn’t take to the teacher or to the language, and only scraped a pass.

I continued learning Latin to A-Level.

At various times in my life I have made abortive attempts to teach myself to become fluent in French, but beyond being able to ask a waiter for a glass of wine or an espresso, it’s been an absolute failure. I like to think, had DuoLingo been around a few decades ago, I might have had more success.

Now, I feel I am making progress with Italian, but it is slow. I can read aloud, and I can translate, but when it comes to composing Italian from English, that’s quite a different thing.

I was inspired to use DuoLingo after coming across a YouTube video featuring its…