▷S4E6 My Husband's Duolingo Obsession (Bonus Episode Preview)
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Rose Thomas Bannister's husband, Bob, has a 2100 day Duolingo streak. For a while, he was doing 14 languages a day. But is he "conversational"? Is he fluent? Does that matter? Access the exclusive full interview by becoming a paid supporter at patreon.com/mododibere.
When he's not collecting records and linguistic knowledge, Bob Bannister is an influential guitar player whose solo albums helped inspire the "freak folk" genre. He plays guitar with Rose Thomas. You can check out their most recent album together at rosethomasbannister.bandcamp.com.
Bob's other bands past and present include Fire in the Kitchen, Tono Bungay, The Scene is Now, P.G. Six, Escape by Ostrich, Julie Beth Napolin, Goddess, Franklin Bruno, Vineland, Vodka, Blowgun and Cat Power.
Bob Bannister and Rose Thomas Bannister perform at their wedding, 2019
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Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Modo di Bere podcast. I'm here with my husband, who is the most committed Duolingo warrior of whom I have ever heard. My husband, Bob, with whom I play music and share a prodigious record collection, which fans of the podcast will well recognize, has a 21 day 2100 100 day Duolingo streak. And for quite a while you were doing 14 languages a day on Duolingo. Name the languages that you were doing. At my peak. The thing is they're mostly language families so it's not the context switching is not quite that dramatic. I was doing Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and French that puts us up to five Latin and Greek German Dutch Swedish Danish Norwegian and Finnish which is an outlier although you can of course is generally considered an Nordic Language, but not related to the Scandinavian languages I added Swahili because I thought I should at least you knew I'd start try a non -European Language I had started with Hindu obviously, but the alphabet was so mind -numbing that I kind of gave up, but so that Swahili was pretty, it's pretty fun and easy. Haitian Creole, which is, you recognize a lot of that from French, but certain grammatical features apparently of West African languages origin, although I couldn't really point you to exactly what those things are, but you know, word order and things like that. That's amazing. Yeah. How much time were you spending each day when you were doing 14 languages today. Sometimes I would just do one lesson in each language, which is only like three minutes, with maybe only an hour on weekdays if my employers are hearing this. But on a weekend afternoon I'll sometimes do two hours or something. So I first started around 2018. This streak of continuous days actually doesn't account for... I started like a year or two earlier than that number of days implies, but I didn't get so caught up in the gamification of it and the maintain your streak and all that business. You know what it was? We were on our way to Spain, where your son resides in Spain, and I just wanted to give you a treat, and I think I upgraded us to the family Duoligo plan, which I thought we would to keep for the length of the plane ride. I just wanted you to be able to do only go out on one plane ride and here we are 2100 days later. So yeah it was first you're going to visit my son in Spain and realizing I'd like to brush up on my Spanish then I forget the exact timeline six months or a year later we were going to Italy for our honeymoon and I thought well all right time to brush up on the Italian and And I just kind of got into the idea of all of these languages, not all of them, but like half a dozen of them, I have actually studied earlier in my life in some at the like college level, so that in a way I can't really tell you whether Duolingo by itself is that effective for learning a language from the ground up. You know, I studied French for like 13 years from fourth grade to freshman year of college. I lived in Finland for six months and learned as much Finnish as you can learn in six months, which isn't very much. - Wait, but you had that triumph when you were able to request mosquito nets. - Right, this was so, at the end of my family's visit to Finland, I think I was 17 years old, we were staying in a cabin. - This is a preview of a special bonus episode with my husband about his 2100 day Duolingo streak in the 14 languages the day that he does and how much he really learns from it, you know, drumroll, in terms of, you know, does he speak it, does he not, what does Duolingo good for it? If you want to watch the whole episode, you can go to patreon .com /mododibere and support this really cool work that I do, helping people be more confident about language acquisition and more chill about it, which I think Duolingo is a good tool for that.
Produced, recorded and filmed by Rose Thomas Bannister
Audio and video edited by Giulia Àlvarez-Katz
Special thanks to Tony Cenicola
