What Trying to Speak Italian Taught Me About Learning
By Julian Dance —
Tags: Cognitive Science, How Students Learn, Learning & Memory, Learning That Sticks, Study Techniques, Understanding vs Recall, Teaching & Learning
A 658-day Duolingo streak doesn't necessarily make you confident enough to order dinner. A family holiday in Sardinia got Julian thinking about context, confidence, retrieval - and the difference between completing activities and actually learning.
My Wife Had the Streak. I Spoke the Italian. A recent family holiday to Sardinia reminded me what it feels like to be a complete beginner. We arrived knowing virtually no Italian. And I didn't particularly like the feeling. When you're used to being able to communicate easily, suddenly not being able to ask a simple question or understand what someone is saying makes you feel surprisingly vulnerable. I also felt slightly uncultured. Here I was, in someone else's country, unable to manage much beyond Ciao and Grazie. So my wife and I both decided we should learn some Italian. We just went about it in very different ways. The streak was growing. The Italian wasn't. My wife started using Duolingo. She's certainly not new to it. She already has a 658-day streak learning French, which is some commitment. But despite all those lessons and all that practice, put her in a French restaurant and she'd be the first to admit she can still feel completely at sea when she actually has to speak it. In Sardinia, she approached Italian in much the same way. She raced through lessons. She earned XP, added to her streak. There was always another target to hit and a reassuring sense that she was making progress. The problem came when we actually needed some Italian. Sitting in a restaurant, walking into a bar or trying to speak to somebody in a shop, much of what she'd been learning wasn't readily available. She had done the lessons. But retrieving the language, at the moment she actually needed it, was much harder. There was another problem too. The app wasn't necessarily teaching her what she needed to know right then. "Nice to meet you" is perfectly useful Italian. But when you're standing in a busy restaurant, Do you have a table for four? is considerably more useful. As are: Could we have the bill please? Two large beers, please. I don't need a bag, thanks One ball of gelato in a cone please These were the things we actually wanted to say. I took a different approach I started using Gemini. But rather than working my way systematically through a language course, I used it to help me solve the communication problems happening around me. I'd listen to local conversations. I'd notice words and phrases. I'd look things up when I needed them. Then I'd try them. In shops, bars and restaurants, I started attempting to speak Italian. Sometimes I got it right. Sometimes I really didn't. If I didn't know how to say something, I'd find out. If somebody replied and I didn't understand, I'd ask for help. If I made a mistake, I'd learn from it and try again. There was an immediate reason for me to remember what I was learning - because I wanted to use it. And that changed everything. By the end of the holiday, guess which one of us was the more confident Italian speaker? It wasn't the person with the bigger streak. And I think that's important. Neither of us knew very much Italian. The difference wasn't really how much we'd learned. It was the context in which we'd learned it and the confidence to actually use it. Learning isn't the same as completing I should probably be clear that this isn't really a criticism of Duolingo. It does a very good job of making people want to come back and practise. But the experience reminded me of something I've seen throughout my teaching career. Activity can look a lot like learning. A student can complete a lesson. They can watch a video. They can answer a series of questions. They can complete the task and move onto the next topic. But the important question isn't simply - Have they done it? It's - Can they retrieve and apply what they've learned when they actually need it? That's a much higher bar. The motivation mattered too There was another difference between our approaches that I think is important. I genuinely wanted to get better. Not because an app told me to practise. Not because I wanted to maintain a streak. Not because there was a badge waiting for me. I wanted to be able to communicate. That gave the learning purpose. Every successful interaction gave me a little more confidence. Every mistake showed me something I needed to improve. And because I was immediately applying what I'd learned, the knowledge had context. I wasn't particularly worried about getting things wrong either. I was prepared to have a go and that 's an enormously important part of learning. If we're so focused on being correct that we're reluctant to attempt something, we remove one of the most useful sources of information we have: our mistakes. A good teacher doesn't simply tell you that you're wrong. They work out why you're wrong, help you correct the misunderstanding and give you another opportunity to succeed. This is something we're building into SideCog It's one of our main principles. We don't want learners simply racing through content so that they can say they've completed it. We want them to retrieve knowledge, apply it and demonstrate that they genuinely understand it. And when they can't, that's useful information. SideCog can identify where understanding is breaking down and respond to what that learner actually needs, rather than blindly pushing them onto the next piece of content. The aim isn't activity for activity's sake. It's progress. That also means creating an environment where getting something wrong isn't treated as failure. It's part of the learning process. Have a go. Get feedback. Understand the mistake. Try again. Over time, knowledge becomes easier to retrieve and confidence begins to grow alongside competence. Perhaps we need to think differently about engagement We spend a lot of time in education thinking about how to make children engage with learning. Points. Badges. Streaks. Games. Rewards. Those things can absolutely encourage participation. But participation isn't the end goal. We want young people to experience the much deeper satisfaction that comes from realising - I couldn't do this before. Now I can. That's the feeling I had the first time I walked into a Gelato shop in Sardinia and confidently attempted to ask 2 scoops of ice-cream one in a cone and one in a tub. I'm sure my pronunciation wasn't perfect, I'm fairly sure my grammar wasn't either...and I know some of the words were missing! But they understood me. And I wanted to try again. That's the kind of learning we want SideCog to encourage. Purposeful, responsive and active. Learning where mistakes are useful, knowledge gets applied and progress itself becomes motivating. Help us shape what learning could look like SideCog isn't just another revision EdTech platform. We're building it around how young people actually learn - identifying gaps, retrieving and applying knowledge, learning from mistakes and building genuine confidence. We're inviting a small group of Founding Families to use SideCog and help shape what we're building. Join our Founding Families programme and be part of building something better.