Duolingo: The app that helped me learn Spanish

I have been bilingual all my life, I spoke Arabic and English fluently since I was a child. I did find out later in my life that my first language was English even though I was Arabic and grew up in an Arabic speaking house and country. Thinking and dreaming in English is what lead me to believe so. Once I got to high school I really wanted to learn a new language, my high school offered French and I hated it.

I tried to find more resources but everything I tried did not suit my way of learning.  I even tried Rosetta Stone but just could not stomach it. Fast forward a few years later, 2015 to be specific. My husband told me about this new app/site called Duolingo and I decided to give it a try. I decided I want to learn Spanish, I felt it is the best choice since I live in America.

I was a bit of a skeptic at first but I gave it a try. The program contains a tree of subjects that you have to go through. Every subject can contain more than one lesson. You can always test out if you know it. I started with zero knowledge in Spanish so I did not test out of anything. They also give you an evaluation if you have previous knowledge of the language, and will unlock parts of the tree that you know. They recommend doing a lesson or two a day, practicing for 5 minutes a day is a lot better than nothing.

This has the tree for the English for Spanish speaking people.

My obsessiveness kicked in full drive, I was racking up and average of 250 experience points a day. I was learning so fast I could not stop, I had days that I could not sleep, I just wanted to learn more. 138 days later I was done. I finished my tree and that was an awesome rush.

You can see the 138 Day streak.

 Finishing the tree does not make you 100% fluent in the language, but gives you a good head start. From there I started to find articles to read, TV to watch and music to listen to. My friend from Spain suggested to read articles and news because they will be easier to understand than novels and fiction. They also recommend doing the reverse tree. What does that mean? For example, I did Spanish for English speakers first then for my reverse tree I did English for Spanish speakers. The Spanish sentences there are more difficult because they assume you know Spanish. This gives you a wider range of sentences. In my my case the Spanish tree was a lot longer than the English tree, but I still managed to do it in 3 days. Again that is part of the obsessiveness that I have.

I still practice using Duolingo, but not as obsessively as I used to be, just because I am at a level where I need a different kind of practice.

As you can see here, I still practice daily.

I will have another post about the other resources I am using to improve my Spanish.