The Flemish polyglot

Launched: February 9, 2021 If you have been following me on Twitter, you will know that I am not a big fan of the green owl. I don’t really like the gamification and the lack of grammar explanations. Big fan of a paper textbook here! However, I see many people, both on Twitter and closer to home, studying languages such as Arabic and Korean – with Duolingo and with good results. I have even met a girl from Romania, who has been studying Dutch for only 4 months (at the moment I am writing this blog) and can already hold a conversation. Impressive, I would say … Hence this experiment. Turkish has been on my wish list for a while now (what am I saying, a while, for years!), so I was thinking: why not try and see what level I could reach with Duolingo, but only Duolingo, no other resources allowed. Could be fun to see … On day 5 I have finished the first level, basics. I did look up the conjugation of regular verbs (YouTube channels), because I really needed that. I had no idea ho

I get asked that question a lot, so I thought it could be helpful to keep a log for a week and let you know what I do to incorporate languages into my daily life – with all ups and down, changed and dropped plans ... Life as it is, basically. This is just a random week, all depends on how much work I have – that determines how much time I have for language learning. The languages I study, are also determined by the italki classes I have the upcoming week. The day before the class, I focus on that particular language. This week I had only 2 classes. As you may know, I am a translator. I work (in theory) with French, English, German, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans and Luxembourgish, but in reality it is mainly French and some English. During working hours, I am already exposed to languages on a daily basis. You will see that although I plan certain things, life doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes another language pops up and I change plans, sometimes other things come up a