Today, when I did my daily German lesson, I reached a 365-day streak of daily lessons. That’s one year of never missing a day. A year ago I didn’t intend to start a one-year streak. I just got into the habit of doing Duolingo every day. I probably celebrated a little when I reached 30 days, and 90, and when I got to 120, I wondered if I could get to 150. Day 150 is about the point where I started thinking about reaching a year.

This seems like a good point to take stock of what Duolingo has done for me.

Around 2015, when our family’s plan to spend a summer in Europe started to firm up, I decided I should refresh my German knowledge. I had taken four years of German in high school and two in college (business German really did me in!), but I had forgotten nearly everything in the 15 or so years since my last course.

Side note: in high school Frau Lewis told us we would never forget one phrase, and I never have: Willst du meinen Hamster sehen? Streichle ihn. Hab keine Angst. Er hat es gern! Which translates to: Would you like to see my hamster? Pet him. Don’t be afraid. He likes it! I truly have no idea why that particular phrase is so memorable, but she was right.

At some point in 2015 or 2016 Andrew told me about this free app called Duolingo. Apparently it was designed through a government grant, and I think Google was somehow involved. He had tried it and thought it was pretty good, so I checked it out. It really is nice, although at the time there were a lot more small errors than there are now. Duolingo starts from the very beginning, with pictures of man, woman, child, banana, etc. It works on all aspects of learning the language — reading in the foreign language and translating to your native language, reading in your native language and translating to the foreign language, listening, and speaking. There are dozens of languages to choose from, including some like Welsh and Navajo that are not very common worldwide. I tried it and was really impressed. I liked that I could spend only five or ten minutes a day and still see progress. I really liked that I didn’t have to sign up for a class, find a block of time in my schedule, or drive anywhere to study German.

I don’t remember how consistent I was with learning in those early days. When we added Italy and Denmark to our list of countries we were visiting in 2017, I started studying those too. My progress on them was much slower than on German, and I haven’t studied either since our Europe trip. But I’ve stuck with German, and I still really enjoy it.

And I used my skills in Germany, especially when we were outside of the bigger cities. I remember conversing almost entirely in German with a waiter at a small town pizza place. When my husband bought lederhosen at a large store in a small town in the Black Forest, the sales lady spoke zero English — good thing he’d been studying on Duolingo as well! And there was the hotel on the Bodensee where only the front desk staff spoke English, and they’d all gone home before I realized we needed applesauce or yogurt for Madeline to take her medicine. Thankfully, I was able to get my message across to the very kind women on the housekeeping staff. There was also the wedding week in 2018 when we were staying with our German friends in Niddegen, and their neighbor spoke only very basic English. She and I had some very simple conversations, and she was very patient with my halting speech. I think I’d do much better if I spoke with her today.

One frustrating thing about Duolingo is that about once every other year they completely rework the course. Which always means that I end up going backward. Last year, I was only a few dozen lessons from completing the German course, and they did a major overhaul. I’m just now back to where I was. Which was annoying, but I must say that going backward really helped me with some basic things, like noun genders.

Here are some of my numbers:

• I have reached level 5 (out of 5) on 117 out of 133 skills. I am at level 4 on the 16 remaining.
• I have earned 794 crowns. I don’t exactly know what that means, but I think it relates to the number of levels I’ve successfully completed.
• Since the average skills contains about five lessons per level, I’m going to guess that I’ve done approximately 4,000 lessons.
• I possess 18,028 gems. These seem totally worthless, as the only thing I can see to use them on is clothes for my owl (the mascot, whose name is Duo). There are a couple bonus lessons for sale with gems, which maybe I’ll do after I finish the course. And you can buy a Streak Freeze, but to me it’s not really a streak if you didn’t actually do a lesson every day.
• I completed at least 100 lessons with no mistakes in the entire lesson. That is not that easy!
• I have four friends. They’re all family members, and I’m ok with that!

Naturally, since I seem to be near the end of the course, I’ve thought about what I’m going to do when I finish. My plan is to start learning Spanish, but to do at least one German refresher lesson each day. Because we all know, with languages, if we don’t use them, we lose them. I’ve worked too hard on this one to lose it!