{"id":11,"date":"2015-12-11T00:39:20","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T00:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/?p=11"},"modified":"2015-12-10T23:40:01","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T23:40:01","slug":"my-history-with-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/2015\/12\/11\/my-history-with-french\/","title":{"rendered":"My history with French"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a Norwegian and a European. Learning a couple extra languages in school is considered the normal thing to do around here. While English was mandatory from grade school and German recommended in middle school, I did not get to French until high school. Our teacher was quite old and about to retire; her eyesight and hearing were failing at that time, and concentration was flagging as well. Years of dealing with teens had not raised her expectations very high, I’m afraid. I did get a decent grade, but with no reason to practice it ever again, only a few scattered phrases – mostly from songs – remained in my memory after almost 40 years, when I discovered Duolingo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I have no particular need for French. Google Translate does a great job with French, unlike non-European languages. But it seemed a good place to start to test Duolingo, at a time when only a few languages were available.<\/p>\n

I did what many first-time users of Duolingo do: Start out with full sails, and then got distracted and used the app less and less. Every few months I would return to the game, refresh the basics and learn a little more. And then I would forget about it again.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, this may not have been such a bad strategy, especially for a language that I already had a vague memory of. After some returns, I had a pretty good grasp of the basics, and could quickly get to adding new words and concepts.<\/p>\n

But I still could not say for sure how much was due to Duolingo, how much to my almost forgotten high school days, and how much to French pop songs that I have enjoyed over the years even if I did not understand them. So that’s why I decided to try a language I had never known a word of. But that does not mean I have given up on French. I am still filling my quota of 20 XP per day, at least for the time being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

French was my first Duolanguage. It is still ongoing, albeit slowly. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french","category-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}