Duolingo Family

In Duolingo you can now have conversations with the emo Lily, one of the cartoon characters in the language-learning app.

While I unleash long, confusing German sentences riddled with clumsy errors at Lily, N answers all of her questions with a heavy pause, followed by “sí” or “no”. He can say long Spanish sentences very well but the idea that a conversation with anybody outside of the immediate family might be more than monosyllabic does not appeal.

With me he’s actually very chatty which nobody on the planet believes because nobody heard him say much in years.

Klara also does Duolingo but she despises languages. She’s doing the math one instead. Like my father taught me what a thesaurus was at 4, Klara’s father has been talking to her about heteroscedasticity and beta binomial distribution since she was a toddler.

I had to Google how to spell heteroscedasticity.