things that make me happy in my apartment

[sistawendy]

My apartment has baseboard heaters, which naturally run more in the winter.
Bad: my electric bill in the winter is about quadruple what it is in the summer.
Good: when I hang up clothes to dry, they're done in sixteen hours.

I've been studying Spanish on Duolingo for not quite two months now, and I finally broke down and paid for a subscription. Why?

• I love learning languages.
• Spanish is hella useful if you live anywhere in the Americas.
• It might appease the ghosts of my father, my paternal grandfather, his father George, George's mother Maria, and all of Maria's ancestors going back to the Romans. All of them were fluent, and only my father had to learn Spanish as a second language*.

What do I think of Duolingo as a learning tool? I'm not sure. The convenience is fantastic. Mixing up the different skill sets — listening, speaking, translation — in a fine-grained way might be a good thing. I'm still not sure about the [ETA: nearly] complete lack of explication; a paragraph of that could be worth an hour of study. And it's often possible to apply testmanship to Duolingo, which you can't do in a real-life situation. But I am learning. Maybe someday I'll be able to give somebody directions around Seattle in Spanish.



*My grandfather got a job with USAID in Peru in the late '40s, thanks in large part to being a bilingual college graduate. He took his family with him, which meant my dad and his siblings needed to learn Spanish when he was in his early teens. On those rare occasions when my dad and his brother got together during my lifetime, Spanish words and phrases would creep into their speech. I think they associated Spanish with happy memories of their childhood.