Hey guys! How’s it going? Wie geht’s? ¿Qué tal?

I started learning Spanish on Duo at the request of my mother-in-law. I chose Spanish because I live in SoCal and Spanish is all around me, town names, street names, etc. I have a 255-day streak! And I am the proud recipient of 135 crowns! Supposedly, I know 753 words!?! I keep trying to translate things, but I seem to know about 80% or less of the words in a sentence in the news or a book… I can pick out ‘the’, ‘a’, a few verbs, a handful of nouns… but I really can’t make sense of anything outside of the Duo lesson without a translate app near me. But the fact that I’ve been doing some form of learning Spanish for 255 days is incredible! I think you need to know ~1000-3000 words to be fluent… so I’m getting there.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I started learning German too. Because I’m crazy. And because I thought it would be funny. And because my husband was learning German on Duo, and also because we seem to frequent quite a few German Twitch DJ channels and it would be nice to be able to read the chat. I started a German section attached to my current Spanish Duo login and I got about 20 crowns before I deleted it and started over with a new login, because the lessons were not the same as my husband’s lessons and I thought it would be more fun to do the same course. Now I have a 19-day streak, 17 crowns and I supposedly know 91 words! I can read things in the chat like: Guten Nacht und bis bald. Obviously I can read even less in German, but now I see a handful of words in chat that I didn’t know before and that’s pretty cool.

At first I felt like Max Headroom trying to remember words in English when I spoke to my husband… but I’m getting the hang of learning two languages now.

So all this got me to thinking…

I will put in the effort to do one lesson or one story in Duo each day to keep my streak. What if I found an app to gameify the things I need/want to do each day? I started using Habitica about 17 days ago… and at first I was doing great… I was exhausted each night, but the instant gratification of checking off my ToDos throughout the day while finding eggs, hatching potions, and food for my pets was pretty cool. I am currently growing 10 pets into mounts…

And have successfully turned the Pink Cotton Candy Bear into a Mount…

Meanwhile I was updating my armor to get better stats. I figured out how to do quests the first being Feral Dust Bunnies which I completed…

How cute are they? Next I completed the Basi-List quest. Now I’m on part two of a 3-part quest. I’m currently battling a Water Skull Swarm which will take awhile considering it has 500hp, and I am getting around 21-33hp a day against it.

All this is to say that I am working on cleaning up the house, and learning two languages, and trying to get some drawing in. This week I have been extremely exhausted, I have literally taken a 3-hr nap three times this week, and today is only Thursday! Which means I haven’t done any drawing except what I did in class on Friday…

We were supposed to do more tangles on this on our own as homework, heh. We have part two of that class series tomorrow.

Ok, my brain is all over the place today. I should wrap this up and try to get some drawing done today.

But not before some pup pics… Nurse Duke is taking care of Little Penny… she woke up a couple of days ago with one of her eyes not wanting to open… I have saline solution and some medicine for this so she was back to her silly self that night… but Nurse Duke stayed near her while she rested… he’s such a good boy.

Stay safe everyone! And wash your hands! 🙂
Until next time…
~nic