
Months ago I started using Duolingo to relearn Spanish. I had years of Spanish in high school and college, but it didn’t matter. My retention was minimal at best.
I had an extra incentive because my girls were taking classes in school and I promised them a vacation to a Spanish-speaking country if they did well. When their semester of class was over my youngest decided to do Duolingo, too. And she found much joy in beating my record. So much so I was forced to take it seriously. Because while I’m not very competitive, I can appreciate the benefit of having a formidable opponent to push you further. So I pushed, and now I’m winning.
I’m levels above her and I’m maintaining a multi-month streak of doing an exercise daily.
I’m going to let the streak calendar reset beginning August 1 and it’ll be me and her sisters. Maybe this time our friendly competition will end with one of them being the winner. Maybe :-).