Learning German from DuoLingo: Day 29 - Sorry! I meant to post this to my blog, not to this community.

Today is day 29 in my ongoing effort at learning to read German by using the duolingo application. Here's an update.

Yesterday and today, I had two goals. First, I wanted to complete all 5 levels of the "Food 1" and "Animals 1" categories. Second, I wanted to reclaim first place in duolingo's Sapphire league. I accomplished both goals, although the league has about 7 hours left, so it remains to be seen if I hold the pole position until the end. By completing the lessons in "Food 1" and "Animals 1", I have now reached "Checkpoint 1". Next-up is some sort of challenge that will apparently unlock the next set of lessons.

In addition to accomplishing those goals, I also did about a half-dozen practice exercises in order to replenish my hearts after failing some lessons.

One thing that I learned about DuoLingo yesterday is that it has a web interface with slightly different functionality. Of particular interest is that the stories were already available through the web interface before they got unlocked in the Android app. With these, the learner earns XP points by reading a story line by line and answering questions that are intended to demonstrate reading comprehension. In addition to the lessons and practice that I've been doing all along, I also read two of the stories today. These introduced a number of new words that I hadn't seen before. The only ones I remember off the top of my head are "total" (totally) and "viel" (very/much/a lot of).

Of possible interest to Steem, the web interface also has a link to a discussion forum for DuoLingo users. I haven't noticed such a link in the Android platform.

I should note that I am continuing to struggle with memorizing masculine/feminine/neuter forms, which is consistently the primary reason causing me to fail/retake some lessons. Also, there's some sort of reward available tomorrow, assuming I complete a lesson and run a streak of 30 days.

Here are some words and/or phrases that I remember from lessons and practice over the two days. I'm going to continue looking up the correct genders on these, since this is a big gap for me.

German	English
Die Spinne frisst das Insekt	The spider eats the insect
Eine Biene	A bee
Die Nudeln kommt aus Italien	The pasta comes from Italy
Der Vogel frisst die Spinne	The bird eats the spider
GroßBritannien	Great Britain
FrankReich	France
Bayern	Bavaria
Österreich	Austria

And here is my full table for typing the special characters that I've made use of so far:

Key press	character
ALT-0214	Ö
ALT-0223	ß
ALT-0228	ä
ALT-0252	ü

As-of now, here are my numbers in the app:

• Hearts: 4
• Streak: 29
• Crowns: 40
• Followers: 2
• Total XP: 3501
• XP today: ~200
• XP this week: 1562
• League: Sapphire
• Time left in league: 7h 22m
• Place in league: 1
• XP in league: 1562

For the record, I don't plan to keep trying to rank in the top of future leagues. It takes way too much time, far more than I want to spend on this endeavor. Trying to win Sapphire this time was a one-time thing.

After 29 days, my recommendation for DuoLingo continues to be "thumbs up".