Chris Betcher

When I started writing this blog in 2006, I was living in Canada on a teaching exchange.  It was a big year for the social web, with blogs, podcasts and the birth of the Web2.0 really hitting the mainstream of public consciousness that year, and it was good to be in the North American time zone to be fully immersed in the revolution that was unfolding.  I'd dabbled with blogs a little in 2005 when I was encouraging some of my students to use a blog as a diary to document some of their Year 12 major works. But this actual blog you're reading now was born on August 26, 2006, partly as a way for me to jump into the idea of blogging to explore what it was all about, and partly to start documenting my own thoughts and ideas. During the first few years I blogged a lot, about all kinds of random stuff.  But gradually I started to find my voice, a voice that felt authentic. My posts became more focused on things that mattered to me both personally and professionally. I learned to...

Hi Duo, I recently cancelled my 7 day trial of a Super Duo family plan. I received your follow up email inviting questions or comments, so here we are... I've been using Duolingo for quite a while now (my streak is a little over 2500 days) and I certainly understand that it's a good app that can potentially help one learn the basics of a language. Using Duolingo I learnt Esperanto to a point of being able to read it reasonably well, although I still struggle to use it in any sort of real conversational way (I also joined the Australian Esperanto Federation, so that helped a bit). I've also dabbled with Portuguese, Japanese and Italian, enough to have some of the basics down for travelling, although I'm far from being able to talk in these languages enough to have a conversation. While I like Duo, and find it useful for the basics, I can't see it ever being enough to make one conversational in a language without additional outside support. When I started using Duo se...