Learning French with Duolingo

So, I've been trying to brush up on (okay learn completely) French.  I took it for 3 years in public school (grades 7,8 and 9) and it was always my least favourite class...next to gym, ahem.  For some reason I just couldn't get into it and I always found it extremely hard.  Even though my reading and writing skills gradually improved I could never understand a word of it (spoken) or say anything in class that I hadn't spent the night before memorizing (and I CANNOT memorize something to save my life, so that didn't work out too well).  Needless to say I dropped that class so hard after I got my Ontario required grade 9 credit.

Fast forward to being an adult and wishing that I had applied myself when I was younger, and taken advantage of free French lessons all through highschool.  I wish I was bilingual because 1) you are more mobile and can apply to a wider range of jobs and 2) it feels very Canadian - which I realize is potentially a weird reason, but I like being patriotic...and I have a verrry patriotic husband so he has probably egged on this side of me :)

I have tried many different language learning methods...but none for very long.  Rosetta Stone I tried in German when I thought we were moving to Zurich....it was way too boring for me - and since the answers are basically multiple choice you can do it almost passively and not learn a thing.  Next, I tried Rosetta Stone in Hebrew when we moved to Tel Aviv, and learned probably 3 words.  I think I need to understand grammatical structure, and I'm way too much of an instant gratification person to slog through "flash card immersion" without feeling any sort of accomplishment along the way.  I ended up taking Hebrew classes which were great, but the motivation just wasn't there to learn the language.

While googling "what is the best way to learn French" ...because google never fails me... I saw a brand new free online language software that I had never heard of before: Duolingo.  I actually love it. Look how cute it is!

I don't know if I like it because I have a slight background in French so it's not totally new (like German or Hebrew) and so I can get into it, or if it just has a style that I like.  But so far it has gotten pretty positive reviews.  It was developed by a guy from Guatamala who got rich selling programs to Google, and then decided he would devote his time to making a free for everyone, awesome language software.  It plays like a game (ie you have 3 lives to try every activity, you can test out of levels if you are more advanced, but you only get 3 lives for that too, you can connect to people on fb or g+ and compete against their progress, you acquire coins, you work your way through a skills tree...etc...)  I also get it to send me little reminder emails everyday to keep my "days spent learning" streak alive.  For a kid of the Super Nintendo generation, I love it.  The following shows that I have completed the first "level" and am halfway through the second.  There are four, and they get progressively longer and more challenging.  I've only been playing for 6 days so I haven't gotten too far.

(I have no friends :( someone be my friend!)

The basic premise is that you learn by translating.  Each "achievement" consists of translating a certain number of sentences between French/English and listening to the computer reading and then transcribing what they say.  There are a couple of multiple choice questions, but not many since the founder doesn't think that is the most effective learning tool.  Also, you translate things from online documents (like wikipedia, or documents that companies have hired Duolingo to translate) and the translations are crowd-sourced so if you enter a bad one, someone else will correct it.  This is how they make money.  Basically the user is the worker (but your compensation is learning a new language!). You can watch the developer's TED talk here. It's a really interesting look at crowd-sourced enterprises.

So I think that eventually this will greatly improve my reading/writing skills, but I'm not convinced that it will have any impact on my listening or speaking abilities (the computer text-to speech bot is particularly awful for French but I'm hoping with increasing user feedback it gets improved).  My plan is (once I have upped my reading comprehension) to watch movies (especially Disney :) ) in French, with the French subtitles on until I can understand without them.  We'll see.

For now, I'm actually enjoying learning French for probably the first time ever.  Sorry French, I don't know why I disliked you so much before... :(  So if you want to try out a new language - try Duolingo! And add me if you do and we can be friends on the site :)  My username is: LiseAsh.

Some of the things I really like:

1) It's super cute, and is continuously improving because it is very feedback oriented.  There are also apps for phones and the tablet android app is coming soon. (I'm pretty sure there is one for ipad already).  The android phone app just launched a few days ago.

The owl cries when you fail a level :(

2) There is a comment thread on each page, so if you have a question about anything you can ask it in the comments and hopefully someone will answer you.  So far, all of the things I have been confused about have already been asked/answered by other users, and the threads are soo helpful especially for all those weird grammar rules..... De la, du, des, de anyone? ... although it would probably be helpful to have a grammar book on hand in case you don't trust users' answers.  I've found that people are quick to correct others if they get it wrong though.

3) You can turn off the speech recognition part so that you don't have to talk to it (good if you are in public places!)  I haven't used this feature at all because I don't want to sit here talking to my computer :)

4) It uses weird sentences sometimes because the focus is on word usage, but this makes it very entertaining.  Some of my favourites:  "I love you, but not a lot"; "My wife is not beautiful, but she is rich" ...

If you know English you can learn: Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portugese.  And you can learn English if you can speak Spanish, French, Italian or Portugese.  Apparently they are looking at adding new languages via crowd-sourcing also.  No word yet on languages that don't use the latin alphabet.

Here is their cute promo video.  (It's only 2 min long). Also a good tl;dr since this post is ridiculously long :)

Santorini

I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record here but I can't express just how thankful and lucky I feel to have the chance to explore so many new places.  One country that I always dreamed of visiting is Greece.  We realized a couple weeks ago that if we didn't start planning something soon, our chance to have a relatively inexpensive Greece vacation would never happen.  Israelis love going to Greece - it is the closest vacation destination outside of Israel, so there are a lot of great flights and deals from Tel Aviv.  Also, this is still the off season so many places are just trying to fill their rooms at any price (yay :) ).  So we had an impromptu weekend in Santorini!

Santorini was formed when a giant volcano (possibly the largest eruption in history) erupted about 3600 years ago (part of the legends of Atlantis and the fall of the Minoans in Crete).  The volcano left a large crater (caldera) that is surrounded by steep cliffs.  I have always had a strange fascination with volcanoes and Atlantis so... perfect place to visit!

We stayed in a traditional cave house on the side of the cliff - it is probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.  One weekend was plenty of time to see Santorini because it is so little, but if we had been there during beach season I imagine we'd never want to leave!

 The place we were staying was owned by a woman who runs a restaurant - she sent fresh bread over in the mornings..yum!

 This wine is made in Santorini - fun nerdy wine fact: Greece is the only place in the world with prehistoric grape vines because the volcanic soil doesn't let any bugs grow to kill them.  All of the vines in Europe have been replaced at one point by vines from California after plagues killed them.

Here we are hiking from Fira to Oia - a 3 hour hike along the caldera - it was incredible! (and windy!)

Warming up with some tea on our balcony in the sun

Spring Flowers

This post is a little delayed since spring is basically behind us here in Tel Aviv.  I took most of these pictures a few weeks ago but forgot to post them.  This is my favourite time of year in Israel - the days are warm, the nights are cool, and there are flowers everywhere!

Dust Storm

I woke up thinking the day was rather overcast which is unusual for spring (by now it's mainly sunny all the time) so I got excited, hoping for one last thunderstorm.  A little later as I was working I noticed that the air tasted sandy...so I looked out the window and realized it wasn't overcast, it was a sandstorm :(  I still haven't got used to the amount of dust we have here.  I'm sure that its taken years off the life of our computers, and I pretty much gave up trying to keep everything dust free (there may or may not be dust tumbleweeds blowing through our apartment).  This storm was caused by a combination of wind and sandstorms in Egypt which made their way to Israel.  Luckily they usually blow over in a day - although this is probably the worst one I've seen yet (we've managed to be away during all the other bad ones over the past year and a bit).  Good thing I decided not to wash the windows yet :)

There is a smokestack in the center of the picture that is perfectly clear in normal conditions -here you can't even see it.  This is the airport runway which was mostly shutdown for obvious reasons!

This one is a bit harder to see, but the buildings in the background are usually very clear.

This is just for reference of nearly the same view (I didn't have one that showed the city in the background) to give an example of what it normally looks like on the beach, year round when the waves aren't high.

Happy Easter

This weekend we were lucky enough to spend a second Easter Sunday at a service in the Garden Tomb, Jerusalem.  It's hard to imagine a place more conducive to imagining what it was like on the first Easter - when you are listening to the message and looking at an empty tomb that is exactly like the one they would have found (or even the actual one...).

The empty grave

probably Jesus' exact view when he woke up... hey guy... (look closely)

Oh hey, giant grapefruit

Pink grapefruits in the spring are glorious here :)

Scuba Diving in Eilat

My wetsuit was a bit short...

I finally took the plunge (hah) and got my Scuba certification!  We went down to Eilat for a week for me to complete the course.  In Israel, diving regulations are pretty strict - they require you to complete 6 open water dives as opposed to the 4 required almost everywhere else.  This means that I got to do 6 real dives, with 2 of them purely fun dives (the other 4 had some tests in them).  I found the most amazing scuba club - run by a woman out of her home that she has converted to a dive school.  If you are ever in Eilat and want to go diving, look up Shulamit's Eilat Diving Adventures. She was so friendly and made the whole experience amazing.  There were only 3 of us at first, and after 3 days (out of 5) one of the people left (they were doing a short intro course).  So the course felt like a private one.  This also let us spend a lot more time diving because during the dives you have to practice the skills that you learn.  This can take quite a while if you are part of a large group, and for our tank sizes and depth we only have about 45 minutes to dive before the air runs out.

The Red Sea is the perfect place to learn to dive.  The water is super calm and not too cold (since it is winter here it was about 22C but the air temp was about 30C so it was nice).  In the summer the water gets much warmer.  The visibility was ok (spring means algae) but usually it is ridiculously good.  Also, the area is a coral reserve and protected so there are tons of fish and coral, and the fish are used to divers so you can swim right with them.  These pictures were taken by Shulamit (our dive master) on our last day:

 

A Moray Eel!

Lion Fish - these guys were all over the place.  They poison/sting you if you touch their fins.

Zach swimming with a little fish friend

Finished our last dive - we are certified! (I'm on the right)

OCTOPUS!  This guy was big enough that he didn't feel the need to camouflage into the coral.