Duolingo

Commentary: I'm still not sure if it actually helped me learn Spanish or not...

I watched in horror as a mobile phone app went through the stages of grief in its attempt to get me back. She was speaking the language of the real world with actual words, and I was woefully unequipped to respond. But I suspect that if my wife were to walk out of her home office, right this very second, and speak to me in Spanish, I'd freak out. We had so much planned, to the point where I barely had time to check my phone. All that's left: the decaying tendrils of the methods used to ensnare me, my inner monologue trying to make sense of it all. I was barely ashamed of my incompetence. It was also a decision tied to a productivity kick. Duolingo was a machine designed to make me feel superficially productive. In that time, my sister-in-law went from knowing close to zero Spanish to handling every situation using a language she'd been learning on the fly. At the end of October, I decided to start studying Spanish on Duolingo. But the truth was I wanted to learn Spanish because, while visiting family -- who had spent 10 months working in Chile -- I'd become inspired by how quickly they'd acclimated. But it's really a story about doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.