How I accomplished in 800+ the streak in Duolingo.
So I started wanting to learn Spanish in high school but could not figure out how to plug that in the my schedule. Over the course of college of course my parents encouraged me to take Spanish because so many people spoke it and it would be good to speak another language. In my 20s I wanted to learn but I was focused on my career and my wife and starting to have children in our late 20s. 30s and 40s I didn't do a lot because I was busy running around working, taking care of kids, being with my wife and family and traveling here and there to see other family, and all the things that you do as an adult. They were really good excuses for not learning Spanish.
At one point we invited a friend from church to come to our house and teach us Spanish. We got all four kids in the room with us and she taught us a few words and phrases. Nobody practiced so she stopped coming after three visits.
Almost 2 years ago I finally paid the subscription price for DuoLingo and decided that since I was paying for it I needed to do it every day. I started learning Spanish and Chinese. Spanish came along pretty well although it's still challenging. Chinese is so foreign that I had to stop but I would like to try that again.
But now I have over 880 days in a row of doing a DuoLingo lesson or two or three per day. How did I do such a long run?
At first it was an issue because I would say I have to do my DuoLingo. That made it feel like it was an enemy or something bearing down on me and I had to do it. And of course my wife had some resentment toward toward it because it distracted me from listening to her. The kids didn't understand. Everybody would just walk up when I was in the middle of doing a lesson and interrupt me. I couldn't get any consistency.
Another thing that I ran into was the repetitive and singular nature of it. It became "DuoLingo" and in my brain I couldn't accept that I was to be focused on this one app that could crash at any minute and beyond. So I started doing another language learning app alongside of it. And I paired it with DuoLingo so that if I did DuoLingo I did the other one also. That gave me a lot more variety and different tracks of learning so that my brain got to see and hear different words in different challenges and instead of just being singularly focused on dual lingo and following the line now I was approaching something from multiple log directions and it was more challenging.
As I went along I had other things that I wanted to do consistently like a devotional and meditation. And I decided that I wanted to read a chapter of Proverbs a day for every day of the month.
So I incorporated all those things into what I call my "lessons". That way it's kind of mysterious and exciting when I tell people that I'm doing my lessons they ask if I'm going to school and then I have an opening to talk about it with them. Or with my family especially my wife it's a way to let her know that I need a few minutes alone.
The other thing that I did was I made a specific place that I tend to go to to do my lessons. I chose the hope in our bedroom. It is in front of the bay window. I sit on it like a bench and I got my wife to agree that when I'm sitting on the hope chest I am not to be disturbed. At first she would walk in and start talking and then start apologizing, then she would come in and start to talk and look at me and get a scowl on her face and turn around real quick and leave and then talk to me as soon as I came out. My two teenage boys still walk in and just start talking to me and I hold up a hand and ask them to leave me alone for a few minutes. And then after I'm done I go and find whoever wanted to talk to me and find out what it is we were going to talk about.
So combining things it's about half an hour worth of work. Along with having a specific place that my family supports not interrupting me this has helped me to do my lessons consistently now.
The best part is that I'm starting to really learn and understand Spanish. I'm extremely slow and I feel like a child when I try to speak it, but when I look at words on webpages and signs I'm starting to really grasp what they mean and what they're talking about. Especially in context because there's other clues. When I hear it I can pick up bits and pieces but just like with English people that speak Spanish natively are very fast. When I listen to the radio and they're going at full speed talking about the store and the sales and all that I only pick up about every fifth word or so. Still fun to do!
I'm very satisfied with my approach to learning this and I'm happy that I am actually accomplishing one of my life goals of learning to speak and understand Spanish. Makes me want to set some other goals so that I can accomplish them to.
