Things Duolingo Says [Vol. 2]

Welcome to Dating with Duolingo, where Duolingo teaches you exactly what you shouldn’t say to find the man/woman of your dreams. Names are borrowed from the Social Security Administration’s top 100 names over the past century to be as generic as possible. With that said, let’s head to the local bar and learn how to discuss your new soulmate.

After a long day of work at a lamp design studio where they’ve spent the last three hours discussing the ideal lightbulb angle for their newest lamp, Mary and Patricia roll into the bar for a couple drinks and dinner. “I really think 37.5 degrees is perfect,” Mary says when they’re settled at the bar with their first drinks. “It’s just the right compromise between style and illumination.”

Patricia downs a shot of vodka and groans. “No more work talk.”

“Okay, fine,” Mary says. “Well,” she adds after a moment,

Patricia pauses, a second shot of vodka halfway to her mouth. “What?”

“I’m not kidding,” Mary says. “I’m tired of being single.”

“You could get a dog,” Patricia says.

“A dog?” Mary says. “Can a dog make dinner for me? Help with dishes? Do my laundry?”

Patricia shrugs. “No, but just like a boyfriend it can unexpectedly eat your food, break your favorite mug, and push you to the edge of the bed and steal your blankets at night.”

Mary is about to reply when somebody catches her eye. She grabs Patricia’s arm and spins her around to face a table across the bar. “That guy over there in the green shirt.

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Across the room, Robert and William are eating fries and watching the curling championship. At a commercial break, Robert glances around the room to see what else is playing on the bar TVs. He spots Mary and Patricia at one end of the bar and nudges William with his foot. “Hey, man. I think that woman over there is looking at you.”

William follows Robert’s nod toward Mary, who suddenly becomes very interested in the Bangladesh Cricket League game on the nearest TV. His jaw drops. “Dude,” he says,

“What?” Robert says.

William gets up. “I’m going to go talk to her.” He saunters over to the bar and leans on the counter next to Mary. “Hi.”

Mary turns away from the cricket game and smiles coyly. “Hi.”

William points to the seat next to Mary. “Can I sit here?”

“Sure,” Mary says. On the other side of her, Patricia starts gulping down a mostly-full glass of Long Island iced tea.

William sits down. “So,” he says,

Mary's smile broadens. “Aren’t you a charmer?” she says.

Patricia thumps her empty glass on the counter, pushes a handful of bills at the bartender, and stands up. “Well, I’ve got to get going.” William and Mary, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, don’t hear her. On her way out of the bar, Patricia kicks the leg of Robert’s chair. “Hey. You want to get out of here?”

Robert looks away from the blissful couple at the bar, then up at Patricia. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

End scene. And there you have it. A completely realistic and appropriate account of true love.

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.

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.