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I had always planned to learn a new language in retirement but did not start doing it until last June after reading posts about Duolingo in CD retirement forum.
I completed Duolingo Italian course (51 units) twice in 3 months just in time for our trip to Italy at end of last September. My limited Italian was extremely useful during the trip. I then relearned French and completed this long course (167 units) in 2 months. My goal for 2024 was to learn another language so I started the Spanish course on January 1 and finished section 3 (equivalent to CEFR A1 level) after 27 days -36 units out of total 169 units. It has been taking me 2-3 hours a day. From now on, I think I will slow down and spend maybe 15-20 minutes a day to continue leaning Spanish and to refresh Italian and French.
My husband sent me the link to this article yesterday:
How Being Bilingual Helps Your Brain (Even If You Learn a New Language in Adulthood)
In this century, some of the key discoveries about the benefits of bilingualism owe to the research of York University cognitive scientist Ellen Bialystok and her collaborators. Speaking a foreign language, she explains in this Guardian interview, requires using the brain’s “executive control system, whose job it is to resolve competition and focus attention. If you’re bilingual, you are using this system all the time, and that enhances and fortifies it.” In one study, she and her team found that bilinguals with advanced Alzheimer’s could function at the same cognitive levels with milder degrees of the same condition. “That’s the advantage: they could cope with the disease better.”
So I do have to thank CD posters (Mightyqueen and Perryinva) for introducing me to Duolingo thus helping to slow down my old age mental decline ;-)
I am learning Español via Duolingo for upcoming trip to España.
I used to use Memrise, but it has changed so much and is now crap, in my opinion.
For European trips, I have learned some:
Português
Euskara
Català
Italiano
Slovene
Nederlands
Français
I tried Memrise to learn French but dropped it after half a dozen lessons. I liked that it used native French speakers instead of computer-generated speakers in Duolingo but the incessant prompts to use the paid version was very annoying.
I did get annoyed with Duolingo's limited hearts in the free version then learned that I can get unlimited hearts without having to use the paid version. All I had to do was to open my own school to enroll myself to get unlimited hearts. When I used Duolingo outside of the school, it was a pleasant surprise to see that I still have unlimited hearts.
Duolingo is quite good for a free version but I found it is quite lacking in instructions. The guidebooks are quite skimpy and do not give you good basic foundations especially for grammar, verb conjugations, pronunciations rules etc.
In the last few days, I tried the Great Courses' Learning Spanish - How to Understand and Speak a New Language, and was quite impressed with their approaches. It is way superior to Duolingo's method. I got the DVDs from our local library and was able to find pdf files of the workbooks. I hope to finish the Learning Spanish I within a month and II in another month. I am pretty confident that I would have a good working knowledge of Spanish when completing these 2 courses.
Learning can be quite addictive. I thought I would cut back my language studying time to < 30 minutes a day. However after watching few of The Great Courses's Learning Spanish videos, listening to its audio portions and doing the workbook's excercises, I am likely to spend at least 1 hour a day to learn Spanish in the next two months.
I have a decent command of my native language, can communicate some in French, and understand what is being said in some Spanish (which has dialects according to country and area), but for me learning the "basic" computer language enough to be able to create programs was a game changer.
Computer languages force the programmer out of anything but logic and cause and effect. I could literally feel my brain changing and abandoning nonsense as I learned. I do not suggest that it is something that works for everyone, and the acquisition of languages like Mandarin and other oriental languages by non-native speakers hold me in awe.
I had always planned to learn a new language in retirement but did not start doing it until last June after reading posts about Duolingo in CD retirement forum.
I completed Duolingo Italian course (51 units) twice in 3 months just in time for our trip to Italy at end of last September. My limited Italian was extremely useful during the trip. I then relearned French and completed this long course (167 units) in 2 months. My goal for 2024 was to learn another language so I started the Spanish course on January 1 and finished section 3 (equivalent to CEFR A1 level) after 27 days -36 units out of total 169 units. It has been taking me 2-3 hours a day. From now on, I think I will slow down and spend maybe 15-20 minutes a day to continue leaning Spanish and to refresh Italian and French.
My husband sent me the link to this article yesterday:
How Being Bilingual Helps Your Brain (Even If You Learn a New Language in Adulthood)
So I do have to thank CD posters (Mightyqueen and Perryinva) for introducing me to Duolingo thus helping to slow down my old age mental decline ;-)
This is great! So glad to hear it.'
I went to Costa Rica for Christmas this year. Everything was in both English and Spanish, and I was amazed at how much I could read. Speaking to and understanding real live people is a little harder, though, so I asked the servers at the resort to please let me speak Spanish to them and have them speak to me, and they were happy to do so. I'd get up in the morning and someone would ask in Spanish if I slept well. I think they got a kick out of the old lady trying to learn their language. Everyone was great.
Learned some new words, too. I knew "perezoso" meant "lazy", but I discovered it's also the Spanish word for sloth, of which there were a number hanging out in the trees there. Makes sense, given the meaning of "sloth".
Turns out several of the staff told us they used Duolingo to learn English. Bless them, English must be hard as heck to learn for non-native speakers. At least Spanish only has five vowel sounds and the words are pronounced the way they are spelled, more or less.
I had also started learning French, which is NOT pronounced the way it is spelled, but I concentrated more on Spanish because I will use that more. However, I can read more now in French, and I could probably ask for a table and order food and maybe even find my way to a train station.
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