Duoversary

7 years!!!

Seven years ago, I started learning my fourth language, and the first foreign language of my life - French.

I joined French classes a year after everyone began, as a result, I was very behind on the content. I absolutely hated learning languages back then. It was more of remembering how different letters came together, but none of that made sense. 

I did not know the difference between e, è, é, ê or ë. Initially, I thought that my teacher had unique handwriting :O

I was too embarrassed to ask questions in class. Signing up for Duolingo to catch up on French was a very desperate attempt to learn the language. For the first couple of months, I did not enjoy Duolingo either. It was words, words and sentences. So, I left it for a while, struggled even more with the language and forgot about Duolingo. I wasn't a huge fan of the UI either - it was not very kids friendly. Seven years ago, I was 12, turning 13. Probably the UI today would have been more appealing to the 12-year-old me.

Funnily enough, I realised that the French alphabet was different from the English alphabet only two years after I started learning French. It was at a field trip that my close friend back then told me that there were so many differences in how the French and English alphabets were pronounced. In the meantime, I had also come across my French teacher at school who made a real difference for me. She gave me private lessons for free to help me catch up and prepare for exams. She read my first (very very basic) French poem and inspired me to keep going. She also supported me through my first time teaching French to students younger than me, for which I won the Best Student Teacher Award.

Unfortunately, I do not remember the name of my French teacher from class 5, but the impact she made was HUGE.

These little moments made the turning point for me. I had finally started making an effort to learn the language to communicate, rather than for good grades. I also rediscovered Duolingo. From then, it was an everyday routine for me. There was no going back.

I used Immersion every day. I spoke to people from around the world about what cultures they celebrated, the languages they spoke, and life in general. I made forum posts, sometimes celebrating the completion of a tree; other times (hopefully) contributing to discussions on languages and linguistics. I also tried out lots of languages apart from French - Mandarin Chinese, Romanian, Portuguese, Esperanto, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Swahili, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Creole languages and many more. I was driven by a curiosity about how languages worked, why they were structured the way they were and how similar or different they sounded.

Some of the fun posts I made on Duo forums included: a couple of lessons on Hindi and Duo Goes To Australia (long before I visited the country!).

An interesting Duo moment is that I became real-life friends in university with someone I met on Duolingo nearly five years ago. Neither of us stayed in contact from Duolingo, and we only realised months after we became friends at university.

From then on, I have participated in French drama at high school, and have won gold medals at French Olympiads. These achievements hold significant value to me because they remind me that once upon a time, I was indifferent to French and other languages, and today so many years later, I am hoping to make a contribution to the computational linguistics and natural language processing world one day.

Languages have become an integral part of my life. And seven years of Duolingo is more symbolic than it may seem. Although I do not fancy a streak anymore, every year, I will remember how much of an impact it has made on my life - through the languages I have learnt, the perspectives I gained, and the future goal that I have made.

To my French teacher from class 5, merci beaucoup. To Duolingo, merci beaucoup!