August 8, 2025
On the trip to Peru, we ran into a small problem -- none of us speak Spanish particularly well. My friend's kid has been taking Spanish in high school, I had a single semester my junior year of college (1996) and my friend had gotten a Duolingo account. Our very basic command of the language (barely) got us through a lot of simple conversations -- "¿Es OK pagar con tarjeta?" ain't winning me any awards, but it got the point across.
My friend is continuing on Duolingo with Spanish, and I think the kid is lined up for one more year of it in her senior year. Given that next year we're taking a cruise to see the solar eclipse and that it ends in Barcelona, it'll help us out a lot if they improve.
But we also have a couple stops in Nice and Provence, which are notably not in Spain. I took three years of French in high school, and my friend's Duolingo account is of the friends-and-family variety. So I signed up and am (re-)learning French.
When I signed up and picked a language it asked me about my existing skill level: I picked "I know some words." So far it's mostly feeding me stuff I already knew (one exception is "gare", train station) which on the one hand makes it a little dull, but on the other hand it's easy to get 95%+ on every lesson as long as I don't tap the wrong word bubble.
It's very different from how I remember learning French in high school though. Like, right now it's only focusing on singular words and conjugations -- "j'habite" and "elle habite" but not "nous habitons" or "ils habitent". Which feels odd to me because one of the easy wins early on in class was learning how to conjugate infinitives of a particular form (-er in this case, "habiter") and being able to work on almost any verb that took that form. So far I don't think I've even seen an infinitive form, never mind being explicitly told why the "je" and "il/elle" forms look different from the "tu" form.
The other thing I'm seeing is, I think it's showing something slightly wrong? Their questions so far look exactly like statements, just with a question mark at the end: "Tu manges une pizza?" Which for all I know is legit, but I was taught that French does like English and flips subject and verb when it's a question: "Manges-tu une pizza?" I don't know if school was just teaching us to be overly formal, or if Duolingo is simplifying things to get newcomers up to speed. I can't shake the idea that I'm developing a bad habit on that one though.
Expecting people to tell the difference in sound between "ai" and "é" is just a dick move.
And lastly, something I'd apparently forgotten: Working and living in a country uses a different word in French than in a city. "J'habite aux États-Unis" but "j'habite à Manassas." I don't know why it's that way, and I don't know where "en" and "à" switch, but it trips me up about half the time I have to build a sentence around that concept.
Anyway, I'm less than a week in right now, so maybe some of this stuff will make more sense later. In the meantime I'm happy to use a system that's less efficient but lets me learn from my couch at any time of day for any length of time I have to spend on it. If my only option was driving across town to the community college, I wouldn't be doing this at all.
Edit, Aug. 15: Being in a place is apparently even more complicated than I thought and I was lulled into a false sense of security by only seeing certain types of country... It's "en" for feminine ("en France"), "au" for masculine ("au Canada"), unless it starts with a vowel in which case it's back to "en" again, and "aux" for plural ("aux États-Unis", which I corrected above). I still don't know how states or counties work -- did I live "à Summit County"? "En Ohio"?
