Still Language Learning

Every once in a while I pull out my DuoLingo app on my phone. It's a great app for learning languages, in the form of a game against yourself. It's great practice for me and when I'm feeling frustrated with my Spanish I spend some time on it. I highly recommend it if you want to explore a new language.

Yesterday I had to laugh when I came across this sentence that I had to translate:

I've shared this story before, but three years ago during our first week in Spanish classes Michael was telling his teacher about the coches en la calle (the cars on the street) that made a lot of noise and kept us awake. His teacher kept laughing and finally explained. Coche, in almost every Spanish-speaking country, means car. But in Guatemala, it means pig. She thought it was funny to imagine all the loud pigs in the street keeping us awake at night. DuoLingo is not set to Guatemalan Spanish, apparently.

A new feature of DuoLingo that is new since I used it last marks my progress with this notice:

That feels about right. 3 years, 23% fluent. I think I'll hold off on publishing that to my LinkedIn profile.

On another Spanish note, Ellie has started learning to read and write and brings home quite a bit of homework every night. Today, part of her assignment said she needed to look up a word, popa, and draw a picture of it. She's been interested in the process of looking up words in our Spanish/English dictionary, so she helped me find the meaning of popa:

My guess is the teacher is going for the second meaning, so that's what she drew: