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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

> I have a 2201 day streak playing Duolingo. I love Duolingo. I have taken Spanish and French that whole time and German for a few years.

> I can speak passable Spanish and can string together broken sentences in French to be effective

Things like this worry me. If we look at how long Spanish and French take, it is about 600hrs[0] (probably less because specifically French is really close to English and Spanish is close to French). If you only had 20 minutes a day you should be reasonably fluent. But if your wife and you are talking, I'm guessing you average more than that.

[0] https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-688ca4d9dd1f88f5f655be...

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"Worry"? That seems like a strong word here.

This is a game that I enjoy playing. I have never tracked how long I take. Many days, I do only a single lesson. That's less than 5 minutes, sometimes less than 3.

I'm not trying to be fluent. I'm not really _trying_ to achieve anything. The closest I have to a goal is that I enjoy having another language's vocabulary that I can use when speaking around my children.

In that case, sticking with a premade Anki deck would likely be more effective for that amount of time.

But a lot less fun!:-)

Such is the nature of language learning. It's not really sexy or fun to study vocab or shadow along to something you're watching for the 10th time. I see language learning exactly the same as working out- it's just a lot of consistent hard work over years. ;-)

I think there’s a big difference with “practicing” sentences with your wife where neither has a good accent or the best ability to spot mistakes or knowledge of the word the other person doesn’t know (though I have no idea how much or how good the GP’s practice was), and practice with a native speaker (or even better an actual teacher too) who can quickly tell you about mistakes and unknown words to give faster feedback and more deliberate focused practice. I’m not at all surprised that GP’s Spanish is much better than their French.

The issue here is that the GGP has been doing this for 6 years. If this was a year of practice I wouldn't be surprised. But at 6 years? I think they hit a plateau.

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