Dear Readers, while I was in Austria this year, I was berating myself for knowing enough German to order a ‘black tea with milk’ and not much more. But many of my friends had been extolling the virtues of Duolingo, and so I thought I’d give it a go. Well, Readers, clearly it isn’t designed for exactly my demographic, as I find myself having a ‘video call’ with a bear called Falstaff, and another with a chippy teenager called Lily. But it is rather a lot of fun, and I find I can now say all sorts of useful things in German. I can ask where the airport is, and  say that I’ve lost my passport. I can tell someone that their apartment is bright and empty. Who knew that the German for ‘bright’ is ‘hell’? I can say that my brother is nice and also funny. I can say that I’m hungry, thirsty and have a fever. And a cough.

But what entertains me most is making up unlikely sentences. I could tell you that my sick rabbit is in the bathroom, that your various relatives are cheap but athletic, and that my horse likes to hike and to do yoga. I can tell you that the doctor is small but expensive. I could even tell you that the bakery is in Canada. Whether I’d remember any German at all in the face of a real German or Austrian person, who wasn’t a bear, I have no idea.

When I was desperately learning French  for my trip to an ape sanctuary in Cameroon, I used Rosetta Stone, an altogether more grown up app, but I supplemented it with real classes, with a real teacher. I had been terrified out of learning any languages at school, where our French teacher, Mr Partridge, was rumoured to have occasional bouts of malaria. He also had a ‘friend’ in Morocco that nobody talked about. The slightest confusion between la and le, and you were toast. As a result, we all spoke French in an indeterminate mumble, in the hope that our transgressions wouldn’t be picked up. Alas, Mr Partridge was like a mistaken-noun-gender-seeking rocket, and we would be humiliated roundly. No wonder we all hated French. At one point we had a rather lovely French teaching assistant, who was  actually French. Instead of making us feel small, she would praise us for what we did get right. On one occasion, she brought in Brie and Camembert for us East End kids to taste, and we loved her so much that we actually tried it. Sadly, she left after only a few months, and we all dropped languages at the first available opportunity. I so hope that language teaching is better now, because I can think of few things more useful than having several languages under our belts.

So, I am rather enjoying Duolingo, even though my conversations are all bear-based. At least the bear listens carefully and corrects gently, so I don’t feel too much of an idiot. Is anybody else out there learning a language, through an app or by any other method? Let’s give one another a pat on the back. After all, in addition to being good for entente cordiale, learning a new language is one of the things that most helps to stave off creeping cognitive decline, according to multiple sources.