Today's grievance

This morning I went to a qi gong class that was conducted mostly in Italian (although the teacher, Patrizia, insisted on translating a few things for me). I was pleased that I understood about 80 percent of the instructions. It helped that Patrizia spoke nice and slowly and repeated things several times--I hope not just for my benefit.

That's her on the left. I took this photo while Patrizia and two of the other students were admiring a picture they'd just taken of themselves. The class is held in the community center's martial-arts dojo. Evidently a lot of Italians are into this kind of thing.

In further pursuit of some minimal fluency, I am trying to make myself get at least a little of my on-line news in Italian, so this afternoon I read a few articles in Corriere della Sera and felt like I grasped the essence, at least.

I also watched part of an Italian movie (Tutto Quello Che Vuoi, "Everything You Want") on Netflix. Although both the kids' slang and the old poet's high-flown language are way over my head, I caught enough of the dialogue that I could follow along. (It helps that the plot is cliched enough to be pretty obvious.)

In addition, I wrote a 144-word message to our friends down in Montagano, in Italian, which took me about an hour to compose, check, and correct. It's probably full of infelicities but I think it will be comprehensible.

My point is that I am working at this, and little by little I'm seeing results.

Then I opened up DuoLingo and saw my 68-percent fluency badge drop back to 67 percent as soon as Duo realized it was me.

This really does not seem fair. 

But then I remind myself that I'm about to take my second hot shower in two days, and patience with myself and with DuoLingo seems a bit more possible.