So this is my triumph but I'm not sure I'm going to take it much further with duolingo. To be tested - just as I was probably in the first week - on the Finnish word for Australia ('Australia') and koala ('koala') (at least Egypt is 'Egypti' and camel is 'kameli' - got tested on both of those too today) demeans us both. It seems pretty obvious I am not about to unleash a whole swathe of new words and I guess the duolingo model must be something like: string the lower tier language learners along (most of them drop off early anyway, obviously, none the wiser that there is no great epic trove unfolding down the track) and perhaps a few who hang around and finally catch on to the deficiency will opt for a more popular, expansive language course. I mean before they started offering Finnish I was dabbling in Norwegian and German and Duo still hopes I might one day take one or the other of those further sometime.
Anyway, I've signed up to another app called Drops, which is sort of the same but seems - at this early juncture anyway - a little more sophisticated. Drops exchanges a lot more English for pictures than Duolingo which is probably good. It also, of course, doesn't hurt my language confidence that about 80% of the words I'm currently being 'taught' I also know from Duolingo. So I have a 96% score at the moment (largely because of my mental block about the difference between a finger pointing to a small ball - which means I think 'this' ('tämä') as opposed to a finger pointing to a small ball next to a big block, which means 'small' ('pieni'). Speaking of 'pieni', it willl be a big relief to put 'Mr Blue Sky, why is that small tree dancing?' behind me forever. I'd tell you what that was in Finnish but I can't be bothered correcting autocorrect every word.
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