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Godaften Duo, Godmorgen Clip Studio Paint
Nov. 28th, 2020 01:24 pmI started learning Danish over three years ago, and though there were some dry spells over that time, for the most part I was fairly consistent with it. My facility ebbed and flowed – how easy I found the lessons was a pretty good indication of how heavy my cognitive load was at any given time. For one reason or another, the last couple of weeks has been an absolute grind.
This worsened on Monday: I usually knock off a couple of lessons on my phone before I start my day, as for some reason both my language brain* and my Danish accent are better before I get properly up to speed. When I launched the app, they had made some significant changes to the 'game play' aspect of it. One of Duolingo's great strengths was that the mantra mistakes are how you learn was baked into the structure – you could mess up all you wanted, but you couldn't pass the lesson until you'd delivered all its sentences correctly (with a generous provision for typos) so the only punishment for error was spending more time learning, an ultimately productive policy. Well, that had disappeared, Monday morning, replaced with a sort of 'health' bar that allowed you five mistakes and then you had either to replenish it from the points you'd banked up from successfully completed lessons, or quit the lesson unfinished. Given that I make five mistakes a lesson on a good day – and I was in the home stretch of finishing the top level of lessons, so I was reinforcing what I already 'knew,' not learning – the change in protocol was going to bankrupt me in no time. Worse, though, was that it brought back in one great flood all the anxiety I remembered from trying (and failing) to learn French – as soon as I saw how fast the 'health' depleted and how expensive it was to top up, my brain froze and I made twice as many errors as before. No longer fun, Duolingo!
Luckily the desktop version is at least a year behind the updates in the app, so for the rest of this week I ploughed through to the end in a race against the development team, and last night I finally cleared the last lesson and finished the Danish tree (or, færdigjorde det danske træ, hvis du vil). Given Duolingo's propensity for cutesy animations encouraging you to keep going, and the emotionally manipulative owl mascot, I expected there to be, I dunno, trumpets, or like, a trampolining owl, or something, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate I'd got there, besides a little text thingy when you clicked on the icon at the end saying, in effect, 'Tadaa, you made it.' Meget tak for det, Duo.
It has been a good hobby, in a life mostly absent of hobbies, and while I still can't follow a Danish conversation I can at least function in text, so it was worthwhile. Considering language acquisition is one of two subjects** that have regularly driven me to tears, I actually enjoyed it. It's just a pity the last week had to end on a sour note.
The idea is that I keep revisiting old lessons to keep my skills up, but I bid farewell to Duo this week because I'm about to take on a new cognitive load: learning a new graphics programme. For years, people have been touting the superiority of Clip Studio Paint, especially for making comics; it's on sale this weekend so I'm finally committing to it. I started learning Photoshop twenty years ago, and it's been a very incremental learning curve over all that time – I just learned how to use paths this summer! – and I am unduly daunted by the prospect of learning a whole new programme to production standard in so little time. I used to pick up things without even trying, and have definitely noticed the decline in brain elasticity as I trundle into middle age. Why I should be so intimidated by CSP I don't really know; it's probably fear that my diminishing capabilities will be confirmed, more than a fault of the programme itself, which looks powerful and, objectively, easier to use than labyrinthine and often arcane Photoshop. But there are so many buttons, and they don't look like Photoshop buttons, and I am an old lady and tired of all these new things all the time!
Learning new things is important cognitive work, however, and maintaining brain elasticity is supposed to be a key preventative for dementia, so in that regard I should learn it for my own good regardless of what I do with it. The resistance to applying myself to it, though! For all it demands constant stimulation, the brain is a very lazy organ when it comes to getting off the couch and actually doing something.
*My last California housemate will remember the dreaded 'pre-coffee pun', which I'm sure is part of the same phenomenon
**The other, you will not be surprised to learn, is math
This worsened on Monday: I usually knock off a couple of lessons on my phone before I start my day, as for some reason both my language brain* and my Danish accent are better before I get properly up to speed. When I launched the app, they had made some significant changes to the 'game play' aspect of it. One of Duolingo's great strengths was that the mantra mistakes are how you learn was baked into the structure – you could mess up all you wanted, but you couldn't pass the lesson until you'd delivered all its sentences correctly (with a generous provision for typos) so the only punishment for error was spending more time learning, an ultimately productive policy. Well, that had disappeared, Monday morning, replaced with a sort of 'health' bar that allowed you five mistakes and then you had either to replenish it from the points you'd banked up from successfully completed lessons, or quit the lesson unfinished. Given that I make five mistakes a lesson on a good day – and I was in the home stretch of finishing the top level of lessons, so I was reinforcing what I already 'knew,' not learning – the change in protocol was going to bankrupt me in no time. Worse, though, was that it brought back in one great flood all the anxiety I remembered from trying (and failing) to learn French – as soon as I saw how fast the 'health' depleted and how expensive it was to top up, my brain froze and I made twice as many errors as before. No longer fun, Duolingo!
Luckily the desktop version is at least a year behind the updates in the app, so for the rest of this week I ploughed through to the end in a race against the development team, and last night I finally cleared the last lesson and finished the Danish tree (or, færdigjorde det danske træ, hvis du vil). Given Duolingo's propensity for cutesy animations encouraging you to keep going, and the emotionally manipulative owl mascot, I expected there to be, I dunno, trumpets, or like, a trampolining owl, or something, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate I'd got there, besides a little text thingy when you clicked on the icon at the end saying, in effect, 'Tadaa, you made it.' Meget tak for det, Duo.
It has been a good hobby, in a life mostly absent of hobbies, and while I still can't follow a Danish conversation I can at least function in text, so it was worthwhile. Considering language acquisition is one of two subjects** that have regularly driven me to tears, I actually enjoyed it. It's just a pity the last week had to end on a sour note.
The idea is that I keep revisiting old lessons to keep my skills up, but I bid farewell to Duo this week because I'm about to take on a new cognitive load: learning a new graphics programme. For years, people have been touting the superiority of Clip Studio Paint, especially for making comics; it's on sale this weekend so I'm finally committing to it. I started learning Photoshop twenty years ago, and it's been a very incremental learning curve over all that time – I just learned how to use paths this summer! – and I am unduly daunted by the prospect of learning a whole new programme to production standard in so little time. I used to pick up things without even trying, and have definitely noticed the decline in brain elasticity as I trundle into middle age. Why I should be so intimidated by CSP I don't really know; it's probably fear that my diminishing capabilities will be confirmed, more than a fault of the programme itself, which looks powerful and, objectively, easier to use than labyrinthine and often arcane Photoshop. But there are so many buttons, and they don't look like Photoshop buttons, and I am an old lady and tired of all these new things all the time!
Learning new things is important cognitive work, however, and maintaining brain elasticity is supposed to be a key preventative for dementia, so in that regard I should learn it for my own good regardless of what I do with it. The resistance to applying myself to it, though! For all it demands constant stimulation, the brain is a very lazy organ when it comes to getting off the couch and actually doing something.
*My last California housemate will remember the dreaded 'pre-coffee pun', which I'm sure is part of the same phenomenon
**The other, you will not be surprised to learn, is math
