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When assigned a story on Duolingo, I thought I should download and use the app because I am a real professional journalist who does her research. Also, I’d never used it before.

I chose French for my language course. This might be a mild cop out, since I took French in elementary, middle and high school, and college. But you know what they say: an unused bike gets rusty. (Someone probably says this.)

I mostly breezed through the placement test. But it didn’t immediately pass me through all levels, so I diligently went back to Level 1 of plurals, food, animals, adjectives. Like I said, this started on the pretense of research. But Duolingo is designed like a game (learning is fun!), so I found myself pretending to research while actually getting increasingly determined to beat this French robot.

At one point, I realized there was a shortcut — you could test out of 21 skill levels at once! I didn’t pass the quiz the first two times but did on the third. Victory!

But joke’s on me, because my grammar sucks and I should probably go practice my basics.