Last week, I reached a streak of 1600 days on Duolingo.

As you may know, I have been playing for some weeks to study Norwegian before a trip and mainly to learn Finnish.

Lately, we have been in Finland twice: first for the wedding of my veli (brother) and his vaimo (wife) and just last year to meet their vauva (baby) and have a great week in Lapland.

But why write a post about a 1600-day streak? After all is not an important milestone like 1000 or 2000 (although it’s a perfect square).

Just in the same week in which I reached this goal, we were taking a vacation with the Finns in the Dolomites to spend quality time together and introduce them our baby. Now that their kid speaks I had a fantastic chance to test my knowledge of the language.

Why that would be better than talking to adults? Because not speaking English (yet) our common language would be Finnish. And you know, Finns are too kind to tell you suck at speaking their idiom even if that would be the case. I guess it’s a mix of their extreme politeness and surprise someone out of Scandinavia would spend time learning it.

Luckily we were on the mountains, so I could show off my knowledge of animals and natural elements: the ever present kissa (cat) and koira (dog) but also the more local pöllö (owl), lehmä (cow) and karhu (bear, luckily only on signs). And we have seen a bunch of korkeat puut (tall trees) in the metsassa (forest), purot (streams) and jarvit (lakes). By the way, do you know that Finnish has not a specific word for wood? Everything is a forest!

It was also easy to speak about ruoka (food), for instance in Dolomites they have herkullista (delicious) juusto (cheese), maito (milk) and omena (apple).

And I could fluently point out all the colors, or at least the basic ones: virhea (green), sininen (blue), keltainen (yellow), punainen (red), valkoinen (white), musta (black).

It was pretty easy to have a “conversation” about our baby.

Kid: Missa vauva on (Where is the baby)?

Me: Vauva nukkuu (The baby is sleeping) or Vauva juo maitoa (The baby is having milk)

But when we bought a pallo (ball) to play in the piha (yard) the real test began. How could I tell to pass me the ball, besides moving my hands in true Italian style? I could not find the proper sentence. You would think after 1600 days of lessons I would know how to ask that!

Later, I tried to read one of the kid’s books, the ones with a sentence per page and full of drawings, and I knew just half of the words (probably I am overestimating).

It’s true that the words you learn depend on the context. If you have used a foreign language just in work scenarios maybe you can not have a casual chat with your neighbor. Or even in your own language that are areas in which you would be completely ignorant.

But seriously not being able to communicate at the level of a toddler it’s bad.

Therefore, to really level up my game, I need to work in a smarter way.

First, I plan on having calls with my veli avoiding to speak English. He will talk in Italian and I will use Finnish. The only small issue is that the Duolingo’s Italian course is way more complete and challenging than the Finnish one and he is very good at speaking Italian. For instance, during the vacation he had conversations at the bakery, restaurant and other places without problem.

Another step I want to take to learn more meaningful sentences and extend my vocabulary is reading short stories containing the top 1000 words used in Finnish. It seems like that with that amount of words you cover something like 80% of what you need in actual conversation. I actually doubt that the Duolingo-beloved velho (wizard) and uundulatti (parakeet) are among them.

Finally, I am considering stopping reharsing dumb sentences in Finnish on Duolingo and move to another language or maybe the new chess course. In this way I can keep on the 1600-day streak, and also the over-700-day friends one, while actually learning the basics of something new.

I hope that taking these actions I will be a little better the next time we meet, even though at that point the kid will speak better Finnish and would probably have started to learn English!