My 2020 Experiment

Ok, so what is this new experiment for 2020?

Well, you may or may not remember that my co-worker gave me this desk calendar for my birthday a couple of months ago.

So I’m going to learn Italian! A little bit each day, literally. My coworkers think it’s funny right now, but when November and December roll around, they may have a different opinion. 😬

 Now, only reading the phrases in the desk calendar would probably not get me very far, so I am doing two more things each day to learn Italian. These two things only take 5-10 minutes.

#1: Do one lesson on Duolingo each day. 

That’s it. Just one. This makes it almost impossible to refuse because I’m too tired or don’t have the time, because honestly it takes less than 5 minutes.

I went ahead and took the Italian placement test on Jan 1 and I passed 37% of the lessons! 

This was really just a product of good guessing, so I started from lesson one anyway.

#2: Write a journal entry related to the vocabulary I learned on Duolingo that day.

Because I haven’t learned much yet, my entries are pretty short. But, I can already write complete sentences in Italian! It hasn’t even been 3 weeks. How cool is that?

I’m sure you might be wondering, How is Lauren going to learn Italian doing only these three things?

Well, the answer is, I’m not sure. That’s why this is an experiment. Also, Italian is a romance language, which is very similar to French and Spanish. Knowing these languages is probably what got me through that placement test. So if you have a background in other romance languages, this might work for you too. If not, you will need a little more support, such as Italki lessons, a grammar book, and/or instructional videos. I will be refraining from using those resources, because this is an experiment.

Let’s see what the outcome is!

To show my progress, I’ll be posting pictures and short videos on my Instagram account and Facebook page, both are @livingonlanguage. Make sure to follow!