Four hundred days of Spanish

Every evening at around eleven, a cheerful cartoon bird appears on my phone to remind me that I haven't done my Spanish lesson. I've opened the app four hundred days in a row, and I'm proud of my streak. Then last month a Spanish colleague asked me a simple question about my weekend, and I could hardly answer. It made me wonder what those four hundred days had actually given me.

I can see why language apps are so popular. They're cheap or free, they fit into the gaps in your day, and they turn learning into a game, with points, levels and rewards. For busy adults, that matters. I'd signed up for evening classes twice before and dropped out after a few weeks both times. The app has kept me practising every single day.

The question is what kind of practice I'd been getting. Most of the exercises are short: choose the right word, match a picture, translate a simple sentence. They're good for vocabulary and basic grammar. They don't teach you to build your own sentences quickly, follow fast speech in a noisy café or cope with a reply you didn't expect. My app has speaking exercises now, but talking to an app isn't like talking to a person who interrupts you.

There's also a trap I fell straight into. Every time the app told me I'd finished a unit or reached a new level, I assumed my Spanish had improved at the same rate. A teacher friend put me right. The app measures how good you are at the app's exercises, she said, and that isn't the same as using the language. You can win almost every game and still freeze in a real conversation.

So I've changed my routine rather than giving up. I still do my daily lesson for vocabulary, and I've kept the streak going. Now I also spend Saturday mornings on a video call with Lucía, a student in Madrid who's learning English. We talk for half an hour in each language. It's slower than the app and far more embarrassing. Last Saturday, though, I told her about my whole weekend, and she understood every word.