I have seen the Duolingo owl a few too many times this week.
Over it.
The Duolingo owl, the Twitter fail whale – what is it with cute animals bearing bad digital news?
Category Archives: French
woot woot!
Estoy en el fuego! Je suis sur le feu! Anyone know what the correct idiomatic expressions for this sentiment actually are?
P.S. Leah Dieterich’s ‘Idieoms’ (“poems made of literal translations of non-English idioms”) are uniformly beautiful:
IN THE EVENINGS SHE WAS
FOR LIGHT SOUP AND
GOOD WINE / COME
MORNING SHE ATE
DANDELIONS BY THEIR
ROOTS
Above, a case in point. So lovely!
P.P.S. Prioritaire, a sweet and very easy-to-understand (both emotionally and linguistically!) movie narrated in French, by the same multi-talented Dieterich (also of thx thx thx fame). I adore everything she does.
Virunga
This past Thursday I went to see the Virunga premiere at the TriBeCa Film Festival with a couple of work friends. The documentary follows park rangers in the eponymous Congolese national park as they work to protect endangered mountain gorillas and other wildlife from poachers and encroachment by oil development interests. It’s a super powerful film (and super adorable thanks to the special bond between one of the rangers, Andre, and the orphaned gorillas he cares for). Continue reading
thoughts on duolingo
I downloaded the Duolingo app right after I booked my ticket to Buenos Aires. I really wanted to be able to say more than four words in Spanish when I got there, and I had heard it is a good tool to kickstart language learning. Because it works offline I could continue to use it in Argentina, though it is finicky and much better when running through an Internet connection.
It turns out that Duolingo is the best thing ever and gives me a heretofore unfelt appreciation for my smartphone. Continue reading
