Which way is my day going

[bill_schubert]

I was all set to make eggs benedict as a very belated Mother's Day tradition with my wife and found out she was showering and preparing to go somewhere. So that car screeched to a halt. So I'm eating my oatmeal and going for a bike ride instead (something like a 1000 calorie shift for my body).

And while eating my oatmeal I followed anais_pf suggestion to try changing languages in Duolingo. I am now flying through the lowest levels of Spanish. I've always sucked at German. Can NOT get the vocab despite a couple of years of German in school and a couple of months living in Germany.

But Spanish (like French) has such a common root with English I'm enjoying it. Learning a language has zero use to me. Even Spanish. Not like I'm going across the street to have a conversation with the people building the house there. But at my age anything that resembles mental pushups is good. And obviously Spanish is everywhere in Texas.

I'll probably get bored with it before I become fluent, even a little bit. But still it is fun while it is fun.

Now I've got to get on my bike. Once my oatmeal has digested a little.

Comments

[beautiful_dreamer_02]

H'eh.
I tried that "Not useful to me so I want to learn a language I think is enjoyable [I'd had French as a subject since I was ten years old; our public school system was sure this was desirable, I feel it just wasted time]" argument when I got on university campus, but they wouldn't buy it.
I detect my parents' hands in this: I didn't like French, especially, but I could pronounce it almost flawlessly and so my folks thought I'd make a translator at the U.N.. (No pressure, eh?) And the university INFORMED me I was not going to be allowed to take Italian to fulfill my two years foreign language requirement for graduation: I would start with French Lit which today is their penultimate French series before post graduate study.
A look at the syllabus wasn't enheartening, either: I'd read a lot of the works by those authors in English and didn't care for them and didn't believe the experience would be improved by reading them in the original French.

Couldn't get out of it. They thought it would be purely criminal to let all those years of French class go for nothing. And they were sure I didn't need to take a placement test; I had the permission of the instructor (Ass't Dean of Women) and the Dean-of-Students/Dean of Women, so it wasn't as if I needed to ask for that.
And they weren't letting me not take French.
Nor could I take beginning through intermediate Italian (for two years unless I fell in love with it and studied Italian for four) in addition to taking French.

Oops, rambling, maybe even hijacking. Apologies.
And I can completely sympathize with probably getting bored with it before you become fluent. I NEVER learned to actually think in French, so you know I've never been fluent.

[siglinde999]

I enjoy learning languages just for the mental challenge. I knew a lot more German. vocabulary than I realized, once I got into it. The grammar still defeats me though. At least with the help of the internet I have finally figured out why sometimes we go “nach” a place, and sometimes “zu”.

[bill_schubert]

I may flip to German one day. ATM I'm enjoying Spanish and, like you, discover that I really know a lot. As a latin based language I can guess a lot of what I don't outright know. For now the lessons fly by about as fast as I can click next.