Wasteland wrap-up #50

A year of Duolingo French, "A House of Dynamite," nuclear apathy, and the Springsteen biopic...

It’s hard to believe I’ve written 50 of these weekly wrap-ups! It is also hard to believe it’s been about a year since we started thinking about moving to France.

A lovely photo of me and Lyndon at the Seine, taken by Luis Campos when he was in town last week. Lyndon does love to peek over walls that are at his height.

That also means it has been about a year since I started trying to teach myself French, mostly using Duolingo (and augmented with Tintin, Le Monde, and, for the last couple of months, the ambience of Paris).

What is Duolingo good for? This question sometimes comes up, and I was interested in when I started using it regularly some 1,800 days ago (my current streak), as a pandemic hobby. I started with refreshing my German, then switched to Spanish when we moved to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Jersey City, and then, last November, switched to French, as we contemplated a move.

With only one year of regular Duolingo use, this could be you! (This creepy display is in the window of Le Dilettante, a bookstore near Odeon. The books featured are all on their own local imprint, which is neat.)

Ellen (aka, la femme) finished the Duolingo French course in about 4 years, give or take, not pushing it. The app says that would get one to level C1 or C2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which it says “means you can easily understand all that you hear or read and express nuanced thoughts.” My current level, after a year of about 30 minutes per day, is supposed to correspond to CEFR level A2, which means I can “handle simple conversations about daily topics.” That is probably about right — on online tests, I can sometimes reach “early B1,” but that is more about being good with context, guessing, and similar words to either English or other languages I have studied than deep understanding.

Lyndon loves poking his head through the pillars at the Jardin du Luxembourg and looking for ducks. He is not stuck. He is wagging his tail vigorously as his pokes his head through.

I think that’s actually pretty good given the relative ease of time investment, although it is not exactly the instantaneous acquisition that the advertisements imply.

What Duolingo does for me is that it gets me to work on it every day, twice a day. My usual struggle with formal language classes is that I find homework and memorization terribly boring and I am bad at doing things that I find terribly boring. I don’t find Duolingo all that interesting, but the “gamification” aspects (streaks and leaderboards and points and “friend quests” and “daily quests” and so on) do tickle some part of my brain and get me to do it. It is no doubt much slower than a formal class would be, or a situation where you were forced to speak and write and read by an actual person with actual stakes attached to it. (Duolingo Max has an “AI conversation” mode, which like so much AI-related tech is impressive at first but then quickly becomes merely “meh,” as its ability to understand when you have finished talking, much less what you are saying, is still very limited, so it is constantly interrupting and — sometimes quite humorously — interpreting your speech as being quite different from what you actually said.)

A view from the top.

But still, there’s much to be said, I think, about anything that forces you to learn a little per day every day. I have actually acquired enough French vocabulary that I can piece through written French, and can indeed “handle simple conversations about daily topics,” e.g., manage my way through buying things at stores, ordering at restaurants, getting a haircut, talking to the taxi driver, and little street conversations with people about the dog (is he friendly? what is his name? how old is he? where is he from? etc.).

Of course, a lot of that came after I got to France — I don’t think I could have managed any of that if I had been just using Duolingo in isolation, but the Duolingo did, I think, “prepare” the language centers of my brain in an actually useful way, pumping it full of some vocabulary, grammatical structure, and so on. In the absence of being here, though, the regular “rhythm” of the language, understanding real people, and, above all, getting comfortable with being wrong, would not have happened. I think the latter is one major issue with any app-based approach to language: it understandably penalizes you for errors, which is itself a useful feedback loop for learning, but does not reflect the reality of actual conversations, in which people constantly revise their sentences as they are speaking them.

One last photo. Again, he is not stuck. This is a choice. You cannot tell, but he is wagging vigorously the entire time. It cracks me up.

So, is Duolingo worth it? I mean, sure — if its gamification ploys actually work on you (and there is no shame in that — they do work on me!), and you use it every day, then you will, slowly, acquire some useful language skills. I don’t think it will make you fluent by any means. If you’re the kind of person who does better with formal classes, and you’re willing and able to take them, then by all means, that probably works better. But if you’re looking for a light-weight hobby that actually works towards you getting something useful over a very protracted period of time, that’s what it is. It is not a quick way to learn a language and it is probably not the best way to learn a language, and I think you will probably hit some very real limits if you are not augmenting it with other kinds of language stimulus. But as the advertisements correct suggest, there are worse ways to spend a little bit of time every day…

In case you missed it, I (finally) wrote up some thoughts on Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (2025), which came out on Netflix a few weeks ago, for Doomsday Machines. It’s ALL SPOILERS, ALL THE TIME, so don’t read it unless you are planning to not watch the film. My basic (spoiler-free) review is, “I found it an interesting film on its cinematic merits, and thought it did some things very well, but I have thoughts/critiques of the overall plot structure and the kinds of politics it can lead to.”