Day 325: I'm certain that anyone entering their autumn years will admit to having at least one thing they wish they'd done, or wished they'd done sooner. I have many things in the first category, but high on the list in the second would be learning to speak Spanish. I made one attempt with Duolingo a few years back, and was put off by what appeared to be a strong emphasis on dating and boozing. I'm sure there were some grammar concepts in there as well, although they were buried too deeply for me to perceive. Either Duo has improved their content or because I specified my age more accurately, when I resumed under a different profile a little over a year ago, I found them to be greatly improved. Going at my own plodding pace, I was satisfied with my progress in Section 1 at the end of a year and moved on to Section 2. Admittedly, much of the vocabulary is useless for my life style (I don't travel, I don't ride horses or go to the beach, and I've never-ever-ever owned a skateboard), but my grasp of the grammatical structure has improved to a point that I can at least comprehend most of the content in the types of books I do enjoy reading. A good example would be yesterday's foray into "En la Selva Lluviosa," i.e, "In the Rain Forest." I went to bed secure in the knowledge that the Atlas Moth has a wingspan up to 30 cm, and that the cuscus has a partially prehensile tail and African monkeys differ from South American monkeys in that their tails are not prehensile. For that, I can live with having to translate sentences about playing baseball and dancing for half an hour every day.
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