On the day I flew to Europe, Duolingo said I was 58 percent fluent. I worked daily for three months to learn and relearn as many words and grammar rules as I could. Cramming wouldn’t work I’d just forget everything. So in ramping back up, I tried to strike a balance between working hard and working smart. In the 27 years since I graduated from high school, my use of German had been limited to understanding Hans Gruber in Die Hard and little else.

If you studied one of those, you’re in better shape than I was earlier this year. Of course, that is also true of Spanish and French (the two most-studied foreign languages in America), and those languages are much closer to English than German is. One day, I couldn’t order French fries at a biergarten, and the next day, I could. I had enjoyed studying German in high school because it was practical. Something like 1% of Americans are proficient in a language they learned in a classroom. Instead I reached for an app, Duolingo, because when I mentioned this story to a colleague who was using it, I heard nothing but raves. I thought about sitting in on university classes, and asking my high school teacher to tutor me. I considered a couple different ways to shake the rust off. When I learned I’d be returning to Europe this fall, I determined to use the trip as a do-over - to relearn enough German to have grown-up conversations. The dialects, the speed of talking, the accents, they were all so. On the infrequent occasions someone spoke it to me, I almost never understood it. In that time I rarely even bothered trying to speak German. Not one.Īfter the family stay, my class toured Germany, Switzerland, and Austria for three weeks. I stayed with a family for a week, and in that week I did not understand one single word my host father said.

But I quickly learned my skills were futile. When I went to Germany with my high school class in 1988, I thought that the three years I had spent studying the language would apply in the real world.

Duolingo app