Ihor Hadzera

When last time did you learn something fundamentally? From the basics to the advances, day by day improving you skills..

That was the question I asked myself some time ago, and the answer was not very satisfying – a few years ago. Usually, as a software developer, I use Pareto principle which in the modern world of tight deadlines and continuous complications doesn’t have alternatives. People need fast results from the easy solutions: “Quick Start”, “How To”, “Live Hack”, etc. Most probably we will not remember any of that in a few months after the last usage. So we are not very good at developing our long-term memory which requires many more hours and effort to allow us to use acquired knowledge even a decade after.

After understanding the problem area, the next question popped in my mind – what could do to train my brain every day in a more effective way? For me – it was an easy one. I relocated to Poland almost 5 years ago and immediately started learning the Polish language. Poland is a modern European country with a very multicultural environment and in time I’ve started learning polish, a lot of expats asked the same question: “Why do you that? You could use English everywhere, it is just time waste“. Be honest my initial motivation and the benefits I gained in the future – were very different 😉

In the beginning, I just liked how the Polish language sounds, it is a beautiful language which is sometimes called “Slavic French” because of sounds like “ą [aw]” and “ę [ew]“. It is very melodic and soft (you know all these jokes about how the German language sounds). So I felt a lot of motivation and “power” inside me, but after the first lesson, I also understood that it is not going to be an easy win with a C2 level in 3 months. Even though it’s a Slavic language, which has a lot of similarities with my native Ukrainian, Polish has some very unique differences (greetings by “rz, ż, ź”) which make a lot of difficulties for even now, after almost 5 years of living here.

As time went and I started to create some connection with people, and resolve everyday routine problems I understood two things:

• If you want to find friends or close people – you have to speak with them by the language they feel the most comfortable with (by default it is their native language). During my stay in Poland, I’ve met a lot of awesome people which I could rely on and I could not imagine that we will be so close if I would not speak Polish, just because it’s more simple “to open yourself” in front of someone if you just speak as you feel, without struggling with finding an appropriate word and building a correct grammatical sentence. Furthermore, people are always very friendly when see that you do your best to know their language and culture, it very helps with creating an emotional bridge.
• It doesn’t matter in how open and multicultural a country you are, someday you will meet a local person who does not speak in any language except the local one. I’ve faced that situation a dozen times, especially in nontouristic places like public hospitals or car registration office. There are 0 chances you will get the deal with those people because often they just refuse to speak with you.

So after my successful adventures with the Polish language, with passed C1 national exam, I thought that probably it’s a good time to start with something new. There is one language which is used by even 4 countries in Europe – German language, so I decided that it will be useful from both perspectives – the popularity of the language and learning itself. Previously, with the Polish language, I was spending at min 1 hour daily with a teacher or homework, this time I decided that I will go with a more “flexible and modern” approach – Duolingo. It is easy, does not require to much time, and always in your pocket, at least that how I hoped it will be.

So my own impressions after 300 days are:

• 5 minutes per day is not enough time to learn new words. Sure you could spend more, but the amount of the information in app grows exponentially, so with every additional lesson, learner has to remember all words from previous one + few extras.
• You don’t have a possibility to make a mistakes, in a free version (which I used), everyone has only 5 “hearts” to lose, each by one mistake. So at some point, I’ve started cheating by googling, just to pass the lesson.
• Is it very easy to skip. I mean if you pay for the lessons in school or private teacher, then probably you want to gain something for your money, which is also some kind of motivation. Additional point is that you could not skip the real lesson with teacher at any day you want, just because you forget, or have a hangover or whatever else. After few such “changes in schedule”, any teacher will be mad as hell and refuse to work with you. But in application it is very simple, you just do skip the day and that’s it – no obligations, no penalties and the worst – no result.

The initial plan was to give me a try with year’s daily routine and see how it will go, but after ~200 days, I just started using the application because of the year’s target plan, but not because I wanted to learn something new. It took some time for me to realize that, so after reaching 304 days streak I’ve uninstalled the application from my phone.

As a conclusion for the post, I want to highlight that in fact, I’ve gained some basic knowledge in German (which I hope to use it someday in the future), but the level of expectations vs reality doesn’t match too much. And my personal lesson after these 304 days is – no pain, no gain. It is a very simple and obvious rule of life, but I forgot about that so many times.

Finally, I believe that applications like Duolingo, Drops, Babbel, etc. help people to learn new language horizons and my negative experience is unique. In fact, sometimes old samurai philosophy works the best – success is a journey, not a destination.