Now that I am done with university, I have all the time in the world to finally do stuffs that I have wanted to do when I was really busy with studies. One of them is to learn languages. Learning new language has always been my passion and for obvious reasons, I have not been able to squeeze more time out of my schedule to learn them while I was studying. The main reason I want to pick up new language is to connect with people of all places when I am travelling. When I was about to visit Germany and France last year during my elective, I took the effort to learn both German and French.

Thank god that I learnt some basic French and German as the locals there barely speak English, or not at all. Although I stuttered quite a bit because I did not use them while I was in Malaysia, the people there actually appreciated my effort to speak in their native languages. They became much friendlier and helpful when I spoke to them, be it asking for prices or directions.

After going through all the available platforms, I ended up with Duolingo. Apart from the cute and adorable graphical user interface, Duolingo offers the day streak unction which motivates me to do them every day without breaking the chain. Initially I find the languages are manageable but as I progress, I find it harder to keep up, especially the grammar part. Truth be told, never have I expected that the grammar of the languages can be so different with one another. In addition, as an English speaker, it does not really help much when it comes to pronouncing both French and German words as the intonations are not the same.

Nonetheless, Duolingo is really helpful when it comes to this as there are discussion forums for each questions. In the forums, people will also drop their comments on certain issues that they are having or simply some mistakes that they detect while going through the lessons. Furthermore, Duolingo points out the mistakes that I have made and shows me the correct answers. Besides, I can also add or invite my friends to learn languages together so that we can practise it not only theoretically but also practically with one another in order to brush up our skills.

For the past few weeks, I have been actively improving my German. Hopefully I will be able to converse or even watch videos in German soon. Just to be clear, I am not paid by Duolingo to promote it. I recommend it because I personally find it really useful to pick up new languages. Till then, cheers.