![\"french50\"](\"http:\/\/www.chaosnode.net\/duolanguage\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/French50.jpg\")
<\/p>\nToday I am once more “50% fluent in French”. I’ve been that a couple times before, but it gets harder and harder. Ironically, it seems that for every week I practiced my “1+1” tactic (learning one new bite-size lesson and doing one repetition lesson) I fell further behind. The last week I have done only repetitions, several repetitions each day on average, and finally got back up to 50% today.<\/p>\n
This makes a certain sense: The more vocabulary I have learned, the more I forget each day. At the same time, the program (especially on smartphones) seems\u00a0worried about scaring me away with too difficult exercises, so it mostly sticks to things I know. This works as intended in the sense that I usually fail 0-2 sentences out of 20, and feel good about my French. But my day to day exercises lag far beyond the “horizon” of what I have learned, so that the most difficult words are not part of my daily practice at all. That is, if I just press the “dumbbells” (exercise icon).\u00a0\u00a0I can specifically pick some of the almost empty bars a bit above the edge of where I have come, but I wanted to see how much it took to get back to 50% using just the standard exercises.<\/p>\n
Look here: The upper golden bars are those I have repeated and supposedly remember for a while because of that, including most of Present 3. (There are also a few more pages of gold above them.)<\/p>\n
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Then down here at Possessives 3 we see the recently learned lessons, which are hopefully not forgotten yet. And between them is the “sea of grey” which Duolingo does not show me yet. (I manually revisited Directions, as you can see, to see if I had forgotten it.) If I use my 1+1 tactic, the grey sea keeps growing wider and wider, and my fluency dips lower the more I learn.<\/p>\n
I hope this was interesting! “The more you know, the more you have to maintain.” C’est la vie!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I am once more “50% fluent in French”. I’ve been that a couple times before, but it gets harder and harder. Ironically, it seems that for every week I practiced my “1+1” tactic (learning one new bite-size lesson and … Continue reading