I joined Duolingo in January 2014. That was six years ago!

I started with learning Italian and then I added a few other foreign languages. Today, I have 10 on my list with a total accumulated XP (short for "Experience Points") of 67,607.

A few days ago, I received my order of Alex Rawlings' book, HOW TO SPEAK ANY LANGUAGE FLUENTLY. I'm now on page 84 and Kató Lomb was mentioned in the introduction, so I started to research more about her. She was a Hungarian interpreter, translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world. My research brought me to TESL-EJ website where I found three of Lomb’s books.

HOW TO SPEAK ANY LANGUAGE FLUENTLY by Alex Rawlings arrived in the mail today. I’m super excited and I'm placing this bright yellow book alongside my other language books.

I first found out about Alex from Olly Richards' podcast series, I Will Teach You A Language.

When I saw this post by Itchy Feet on Twitter, I was like, oh gosh, that is so what I'm getting when I tell people I'm learning Swedish.

Today's the day! I sat for my Swedex A2 test.

On hindsight…Short-circuiting the timeline to proficiency to sit for an exam may not be the wisest thing to do. It certainly was brave of me and I was being a bit of a daredevil, but so too is the higher probability of fail rate.