Wednesday, August 12, 2020

My First Golden Owl- a Special Duolingo Achievement

 


Last autumn, in the month of October, I started using the well-known language learning platform Duolingo to expand my linguistic knowledge by studying a new foreign language. I chose Spanish because it is relatively close to my native language, Romanian, and it is one of the most used languages worldwide, mostly in Latin America, so I thought I should begin my Duolingo journey with this beautiful language.


It didn’t take me a long time to become fascinated by this activity and turn the English to Spanish course(there is no Romanian to Spanish course yet) into a daily routine. Duolingo’s method of having users learn languages mostly by the use of everyday sentences has worked like magic in my case as I found it relatively easy to assimilate the new grammatical structures and vocabulary associated with each skill which represents a branch of the fairly big Spanish tree. During the first 8 months of studying Spanish on Duolingo my approach was to reach level 5 in each skill and then move on to the next one, but then I changed my strategy and I started doing level 1 on each of the remaining skills until I went down to the root of the tree and I was rewarded with a nice trophy, my first shiny golden owl!



Obviously, when you learn a language you don’t necessarily do it for the sake of prices, but because you want to expand your knowledge, to learn something new about other cultures and countries and for many other reasons, but nevertheless having a precise target, like promoting to a higher league in the Duolingo system, taking your streak to 100 days, then 200 days and so on, or getting a golden owl for finishing level 1 on all the skills of a course, all these extra incentives can only have a beneficial effect as they help me stay motivated to keep on learning and aiming for new heights, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do next.

If you are on Duolingo as well, you can find me here: My Duolingo Profile

After getting my shiny precious golden owl, my journey into the world of the Spanish language will continue until I manage to finish the whole tree, which means getting all the skills to level 5. In the meantime, I am also going to embark on another language learning journey because Duolingo is so addictive that it simply makes you want to learn more and more, so why not? I am probably going to stick to a language which is closer to Romanian, such as Italian or Portuguese, and after that try my hand at more distant languages, like Swedish or even Korean and Japanese, so I am quite confident that my Duolingo adventure will continue for many years to come! 

For the time being, I will keep on improving my Spanish skills, by using not only Duolingo but other resources as well, such as the Coffee Break Spanish podcast on Spotify I have been listening to for several weeks now, and like I said before, I will also start to discover the secret of another language and I will definitely reach new achievements and get another shiny golden owl to my Duolingo trophy cabinet in a few months' time!


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