Russian Duolingo

I’ve mentioned Duolingo on here a few times before. It’s strangely compelling. Sometimes it just finds a way to fit into my schedule and before you know it, it’s a regular thing. I have done a lot of French study with it, and that has worked pretty well, up to the point where you want to be able to speak. And that’s where it falls down. I can read French pretty well now, but I don’t dare open my yap in a work meeting where the customers are speaking French.

Beyond French, I have dabbled with some other languages on there. I did a fair bit of German (which Tammy continues to do regularly), some Dutch, Japanese and even Esperanto. I was curious about that last one. I’d heard of it and understood what role it served, but I wanted to know what the language was like. But one thing I learned is that the language modules on Duolingo are very uneven. The most popular ones, like Spanish, French and German have much richer lessons with more oral exercises and recordings of people speaking. When I tried the Russian one a couple of years ago, it was pretty weak.

I was looking at my bookshelf about a month ago (Hey, it’s a pandemic. Staring at the wall is normal.) and I spotted the Russian language edition of The Lord of the Rings that Tammy had given me a million years ago. I’d had ideas of being able to read it, but the lessons with Sasha didn’t really pan out. I picked up the Russian textbook and started reading that, and then a different one. I still find the language interesting, but trying from a textbook is not the way.

So I fired up Duolingo again. And then things got interesting.

1. The Russian language module in Duolingo has really improved. Certainly as good as French from two years ago.
2. Last year, Ian gifted me an app called Nebo for note-taking for my birthday. It is magical how it interprets handwriting and converts it to text. I created a Russian language notebook in Nebo and… wow.
3. Duolingo has added something called “leagues” that are leaderboards for learning a language. Call it silly, but when you find yourself doing a dozen exercises in a day to move up the leaderboard, that’s game theory in action.

I now have a streak of over a month in Duolingo again. And this time, I am doing most exercises on the iPad. Every sentence, once I translate it / speak it /whatever, I then write it down in Russian in Nebo. It then recognizes my writing and turns it into cyrillic text. That way I can know that my writing is at least recognizable by the iPad.

The combination of reading, listening, speaking and writing has been working really well. Ian asked me why I was doing it, and I really don’t have a good reason other than it’s fun. Maybe it reminds me of when I met Tammy back in Russian class at UVic. Maybe I just really like writing and learning. You only live once.