Parlez Vous Une Langue Étrangère....?

Hello!

Sorry this post is a wee bit late, I'm up in Inverness staying with my best bae, Jasmine, to celebrate her adorable daughter's FIRST birthday. Rinoa is ONE. HOW?!

I haven't done a language post in a little while so I thought, "well hey, maybe I should talk about how I'm getting on learning a new language!"

Last time we talked about this, it was about my Keynote speech experience, I talked about studying French and Chinese at college. I regrettably can't remember any of my Chinese (though I do have an HSK Level 1 at the moment) but I did decide to continue studying French at University. I've also been really fortunate in that my flatmate was a French girl, who's gone on to be a really good friend of mine, and I'm excited about going to visit early next year (I'm going to go during ski season; she'll ski and I'll snowboard.) The downside to this was that her English was a lot better than my French, and so I didn't practice nearly as much as I could have... So I dowloaded Duolingo.

I really like Duolingo (this isn't a sponsored post, I promise, though I wouldn't say no to a collab.) it's simple to use, and gives you daily reminders of when you should take a couple of minutes to practice, and there is a really good range of tasks for you to complete to challenge yourself; from speaking, to translating, match the terms and even arrange the sentences. Plus, you only need to spend about 5 minutes each day practicing.
I'm also going to Lanzarote later on this year, and I've thought a lot about whether Spanish is a language I should learn. When my parents took my brother and I to Spain on holidays when we were younger, we were always encouraged to speak very basic Spanish (I also talked about this in why I study a foreign language.)

The great thing about Duolingo is that you can learn mutiple languages consecutively! Plus, it tells you your fluency level in both. Once you advance a level, you can earn 'Lingots' which you can choose to 'purchase' extra levels. For example, I'm contemplating getting the French idioms and proverbs, as well as flirting. (I'm intreguied, okay!) I might try and get the Spanish ones too.

At the moment, I'm 11% fluent in French and 3% Spanish. These were both a lot higher, but the more days you go without practise, then your fluency drops. I've therefore set myself a challenge of doing 30-60 minutes of one language one night, and the second the next night. Which I'm hoping to fully implement into my daily routine.

I really enjoy learning duolingo, and I'm hoping to reach 90% fluency in French by the end of the year, and 50% fluency in Spanish by November (when I fly to Lanzarote), so wish me luck!

Do you speak any other languages? Or do you use Duolingo? Let me know in the comments!

Until next time, be excellent to each other.

PS, off topic slightly, but if you have Spanish fluency, I participated in this blog post about "The 22 most beautiful corners of Scotland", which has been translated into Spanish. Definitely click the link, I'm number 19 where I talk about Alloway. Or, if you want the English version, I wrote a post about it too: just click here!