Stahlke Adoption

Spelling Auto-Correct

I just downloaded DuoLingo on my phone, to start learning some Swedish.  It's free, a lot of fun, and each daily lesson is less than five minutes long.  Also, incredibly, the program is tailored to the learner, and brings back words and concepts that have proven difficult.

Unfortunately, my English-oriented keyboard doesn't include the diacritical marks needed for Swedish, so DuoLingo keeps telling me I'm misspelling the Swedish words.  So this morning, to solve this problem, I changed my keyboard to Swedish.  Now DuoLingo works well, but several other issues have popped up.

Most of my apps now respond to me in Swedish.  Luckily, the terms for weather have cognates in English, French, or German, with which I have familiarity.  More problematic is that the keyboard itself is now smaller, due to those extra Swedish letters.  My fingers are large (I wear a size 10-1/2 ring), and I keep typing the wrong letters.  The auto-correct in Swedish doesn't recognize the English words, and sometimes even changes them to Swedish ones!  So now I'm entering lots of English words into the Swedish dictionary, so eventually it will recognize them.

I know it would easier to switch the phone back to English, but in one day I've learned about thirty Swedish words!  And it's fun.  I'll keep you posted.

posted by Stahlkes @ 4:24 PM