Human beings, we're so good at finding all sorts of creative ways to avoid doing the things we know we really should be doing.
If the house needs cleaning but we really don't feel like, we'll be checking out emails.
Yet, if there are emails we really have to look at and we're afraid of what they might say then we'll probably start cleaning the house to avoid dealing with them. 馃槀
We're funny creatures us humans. We're really just highly intelligent, highly emotive mammals with too many brains to know who is running the show. Sometimes I think we're too clever for our own good.
Prior to being encouraged to put a new app on my phone I already had loooooooooooooots of ways to procrastinate. Heaps.
Cleaning is chief among those but sometimes it is double checking my emails to see if anything new and interesting is there, or getting onto some silly Web 2.0 social media platform to scroll through posts of people I rarely talk to. You know, all the clever human stuff. 馃槄
But I have a new way, and for right now, I'm slightly obsessed.
It's called Duolingo. It's a language learning app and, while I've been wanting to learn many languages for many years, right now I'm focused on learning Japanese. 馃嚡馃嚨
It is productive in that I'm actually learning something. More than that, I'm learning something I've been wanting to learn for a long time (a second language) and it's something I actually plan to use (we're hoping to go skiing in Japan next year 鉀凤笍).
Learning Japanese is certainly more useful to me than learning Klingon!
It's easy to justify my spending time on Duolingo, learning Japanese for the aforementioned reasons, however I've watched myself over the last two days get carried away competing against total strangers on an arbitrary leaderboard.
As you can see, it wasn't enough to simply overtake the others to get into the top spot, I had to create a massive lead so they'd never catch me. 馃槀
When I'm not chasing people down (or racing ahead of them) on the leaderboard, I'm using on this page, being tested on stuff I kind of remember from school or am learning on the fly.
There seems to be six lessons or so for every one of those buttons.
I studied Japanese at high school for three years for a have a bit of a headstart on a zero beginner. Hence the just jumping into the testing-points-scoring session rather than actually learning new words (any characters) slowly and deliberately.
I'm simultaneously surprised by how much I remember and how little they actually taught us in school in three freakin' years! At the rate I'm going I'll probably learn far more in 10-15 minutes a day of playing this game learning through this app than I ever did at school.
Though at some point I'm actually going to need to scrub up on my Hiragana and Katakana (two of the three alphabets used in Japanese) because I'm a bit rusty and I still can't tell you what "wo" or "ru" or "tsu" looks like in both alphabets!
(All screenshots of the app come from Duolingo. If you want to learn a language for free check out Duolingo wherever you download apps! But don't say I didn't warn you. 馃槀)
