It all started with watching Danish TV dramas, ‘The Killing’, ‘The Bridge’, ‘Those Who Kill’, and others, most of which had subtitles. I really enjoyed them, and began to understand odd bits of the language – nothing complicated but occasionally I seemed to be able to understand while watching the action without glancing at the writing on the bottom of the screen. This must have been in 2011 and it wasn’t long before I wondered if maybe I could learn Danish (much as I love language, I’m not very good at learning others despite my best efforts) I investigated on-line courses, tried a couple which didn’t really engage me, and then found Duolingo.
Duolingo Danish was great fun – somewhat crazy with odd and ridiculous sentences, but there was a forum where I could ‘meet’ and chat with other Danish learners, ask questions of a Duolingo moderator, and really feel as if, in my simple way, i was making progress. I was plodding along, exercising my brain, learning enough Danish to read a simple story book I’d bought, and although my spoken language was pretty poor (probably unintelligible to a Danish person) I was enjoying it.
Then all changed. There’s information on Wikipedia about how it all became more professional, and to be honest, I don’t really follow all the ins and outs of it becoming a money-making machine. There were no human moderators who would chat helpfully, no forums, no get-togethers, no contact apart from the Facebook group which was established. I carried on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo
Now the course is patently written by some computer programme or AI – I have no idea how correct the Danish is, but the English is often grammatically and structurally wrong and I’m not sure if the vocabulary is too or whether it’s so Americanised that Brits can’t make sense of it. I have been plodding on with it but this evening I have come to a sad decision. I am going to leave Duolingo. I shall continue learning Danish somewhere else but I’m not sure how much I’ll actually grasp or retain.
What springs to mind is the phrase – ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ which in Danish may possibly be ‘hvis det ikke er i stykker, så lad være med at reparere det.’
Thanks to Erick Lyngsøe for the free image from Pixabay – Tak Erick Lyngsøe for det gratis billede på pixabay.
Lois Elsden 