Hay un Conejo en La Luna

Thanks to five and a half years of Spanish classes in middle and high school, I know more Spanish than Mandarin. By a lot. I know how to count in Chinese, plus maybe 2-3 dozen additional assorted words and phrases. In Spanish, I can guess my way through non-technical written work and understand soccer on Univision Deportes. Which wasn’t my goal in learning Spanish, but it’s an appreciated side benefit.

My middle school made every student take half a year of Spanish and half a year of French before choosing a language to continue. I think the idea was to expose everyone to the less-popular French language, but at the end of the year I mainly picked Spanish because I didn’t want to learn any more French. What’s the point of having a whole alphabet if you ever only pronounce six of the letters? Over the next two years, I completed the equivalent of Spanish I. We learned our numbers, foods, school supplies, and family members and were introduced to “Vamos a La Playa,” Casi se muere (in English, Almost Died), and telenovelas.

In high school, we continued our language journey with Realidades (Prentice Hall’s Spanish textbook series, which I actually think taught Spanish pretty well). We learned more tenses, more vocabulary, and started having to write full paragraphs in Spanish. I stuck with it through Spanish IV, where my class regularly didn’t do our homework, failed our comprehension pop quizzes, failed our vocabulary quizzes, and spent a lot of time arguing with our teacher. After that lovely experience, I quit Spanish my senior year of high school so I could take AP Chemistry, AP Physics, and AP Calculus all at the same time.

At Cornell, engineers do not have a language requirement. You can take a language to fulfill part of your liberal studies requirement, but it’s not mandatory. I did not end up taking any language classes while at Cornell, Spanish or otherwise, at least in part because it’s hard to fit them into an engineering schedule. Plus my brain had plenty of other things to keep track of. During senior year, one of my friends told me about the Duolingo app. It’s free and has dozens of languages to learn, though Spanish and French are the most well-developed. The way Duolingo works is it has various topics (present tense verbs, travel, family, participles, etc.) with lessons. After a certain number of lessons, you move on to the next level for that topic and unlock other topics. As you progress to more advanced topics and higher levels, the exercises get more complicated, both in terms of sentence structure and the type of questions you’re asked. At lower levels, there’s more multiple choice and fill in the blank questions, while at higher levels you’re asked to do more translations.

The app was okay, but a decent amount of the material was either too easy or too annoying to input on a phone, so I didn’t get very far in the Spanish course before stopping. Some time later, I found out there’s a desktop version, which I like a lot better, and I worked on it on and off so I wouldn’t completely forget my Spanish. Recently, I completed the course (every topic, every lesson). My opinion is that it was good for review, but I wouldn’t recommend using it to learn Spanish from scratch, though they have started adding notes that help. The vocabulary is okay; where it lacks is in teaching verb conjugations, especially the irregular verbs. You also get some really weird sentences, like “They have a good feather selection” and “My horse sent a message to all my contacts.” I can’t complain too much, though, because it’s free.

I still have some content to go through – they have stories with comprehension questions and a podcast that I’m pretty close to understanding without the transcript because they talk slowly. But to conclude, I still know a reasonable amount of Spanish; for a free course, Duolingo is good, though not the best for learning without other resources; and the title of this post comes to you courtesy of Realidades 2 or 3. It’s a chapter about myths/legends, and “hay un conejo en la luna” means “there is a rabbit in the moon.” Have I ever, once, needed to know how to say that conversationally? No, no I have not.