Things Duolingo Says [Vol. 1]

Imagine this. You’ve travelled (pre/post-covid) across the world for an exciting summer vacation. You can’t wait to see the sights, eat local food, and be immersed in a different culture. At the bus stop, waiting for the bus, you meet a fellow passenger and begin to converse using the foreign language skills you specially acquired for this trip. After discussing the weather, confirming that you’re a visitor to this fair country, and getting a restaurant recommendation, your new friend gestures to your bulging backpack and casually asks what you’ve got in there. “Oh, that,” you say. “I packed my cat in my backpack.”¹ Thank goodness, you think, I learned how to say that on Duolingo.

Duolingo has a bit of a reputation for teaching you sentences that you absolutely do not need to know how to say. It may stem from its initial intent of teaching through translating sentences from the internet. There’s a lot of weird stuff on the internet. As they’ve moved toward developing a more comprehensive language learning platform and generating their own content, the bizarre sentences have stayed. To practice these extremely useful phrases, I decided to come up with hypothetical situations in which they would be valuable to know.

All Ears
Walking down the street in some big city full of strange people, you and your travelling buddy are taking in the sights. There’s a lovely Gothic church down the street. Quaint cafés and specialty cheese shops line the street. Suddenly, you stop in your tracks in the middle of the sidewalk and grab your friend’s arm. “Look,” you say, pointing out a man across the street, “that man has so many ears.”² (Does he have extra ears on his head? Is he carrying an armful of ears? Who knows.)

Wanted: Dead or Alive
To graduate, your high school requires you to perform community service hours. Unfortunately, you waited too long to sign up and the only opening left is at the nursing home. When you show up to fulfill your hours, you’re given a list of residents to spend some time with. You take the list and locate the first resident. You knock lightly on the door and enter the room. “Hey!” you say brightly. “Are you dead?”³

The Pen is Mightier
After the weekend, you and your coworker are catching up over cups of coffee while hiding from the boss in the kitchen. Your coworker, with whom you share the hobby of quill pen calligraphy, mentions a new stationary store that opened across town. You nod. You’ve heard about this store. “Ah, yes,” you say. “They have a good selection of feathers.”⁴

This concludes the first volume of Things Duolingo Says. If you enjoyed it, don’t worry, there’s plenty more where this came from.

¹En español, my Duolingo language of choice: Empaqué a mi gato en la mochila.
²Ese hombre tiene tantas orejas.
³¡Oye! ¿Está muerto?
⁴Tienen una buena selección de plumas.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

My latest slightly ill-advised adventure took place on a Sunday morning at the beginning of January. I rolled out of bed and was eating breakfast when I looked out the window and saw a snowy winter wonderland. Because it was early on a weekend morning, the snow was light enough, and it hadn’t been windy overnight, not only was the ground covered in several inches of snow, but so were all the tree branches. I’ve been working on a photography project (to be revealed later), and was waiting for a day such as that to get snow photos. After consulting three weather forecasts, I determined that the temperature was going to rise above freezing by lunch, and two out of three forecasts said that the snow would stop by midmorning. The third said it would turn to rain, but two out of three is sixty-seven percent, which is a passable grade in plenty of engineering courses. Also, it didn’t feel like a snow to rain kind of day, and I was willing to take the risk of getting caught in rain. I decided to try and catch the window of time after the snow stopped and before the temperature rose above freezing so there wouldn’t be snowflakes blurring my pictures but would be snow on the tree branches. Which meant that I had to get out that morning.

Having no progeny, pets, or plants to be responsible for, I finished breakfast, got dressed, and was out the door with my camera, water, snack, and extra dry jacket, mittens, and hat in ten minutes. My destination: Barton Nature Area. Depending on your definition of walkable, it’s walkable from my apartment. I arrived at the nature area without incident, encountering the usual three categories of people dumb hardy and adventurous enough to be out in that kind of weather: dog walkers, exercisers (including runners, cross country skiers, and fat bikers – bikers riding fat bikes, not bikers who are fat), and photographers. And I got the timing almost exactly right. It stopped snowing about fifteen minutes after I arrived and by the time I left, the snow was already melting off the trees.

This nature area is contained within a loop of the Huron River, with bridges connecting it to the other side of the river. It’s adjacent to the Bird Hills, Kuebler Langford, and Hilltop Nature Areas, which together form one of the largest, if not the largest, contiguous-ish natural areas in Ann Arbor. There is a way to hike a loop through the four parks (which I did here), but on this morning I stayed within the Barton Nature Area. There are good views of the river, a dam (according to the parks and rec website it’s the only dam in the city still generating electricity), and a pond. I walked a loop through the park before making my damp way back to my apartment, where I spent the rest of the day nice and warm. Enjoy the photos.

The Huron River from the south bridge

Looking the opposite direction, train bridge and US 23/M-14

Snow-covered trees

A tree and a pond

Train tracks