I was late to discover the pleasure of reading. It wasn’t until I was twelve or so that I actually was able to complete and enjoy reading a book. I remember reading piles of comics. A neighbour ran the tiny kiosk at our local railway station and she was generous in sharing many comics with my brother and me. I remember reading many of the illustrated classics, my brother’s Eagle paper. One that sticks out in my memory is the centrefold – of the exploded engineering drawings of the brand new Morris Mini Minor. That was the kind of porn I remember growing up with!

As soon as I developed a taste for books, however, I started spending a lot of time and almost as much of my available cash in the city’s numerous second-hand bookshops.

I’m reminded of this after discovering a brilliant not-so-new app for language learners, Duolingo. I surprised myself when, trying the app out, I chose Swedish. This is a language I fell in love with as a 14 or 15 year-old, primarily because of its appearance on the page.

I had started studying German at school along with French, following the dubious advice of our school’s ‘careers advisor’. Seriously, how are teachers of all people able to advise students about the career options available?!? Anyway, my particular adviser, when he heard I was interested in electronics, immediately decided I should study German as that was what engineers and scientists did, just as doctors studied Latin.

I enjoyed German. While I found the traditional fraktur typeface interesting and readable it didn’t appeal to as much as more contemporary books. It must have been around this time I stumbled onto the Bauhaus and saw indirect examples of their work in some of the secondhand German books I found in Sydney. I only seemed interested in books that weren’t written in English!

Large numbers of German-speaking immigrants had arrived in Australia during the 1950s and many brought their books with them. I devoured everything I could lay my hands on from cookbooks to evangelical Lutheran tracts.

In the same shelves as these discarded German books I found books in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. I know the Snowy Mountains project attracted large numbers of Scandinavians to Australia. And I have to say it was love at first sight. The Swedish books I found were quite modern, probably set in something like Helvetica and featured white space, and in my memory, colour. They probably reminded me of Kindergarten. German childrens’ books of the 1930s have the same qualities.

But most of all I loved the strange accents and bizarre combinations of consonants at the beginning of words in Swedish, which when I tried to pronounce them actually made sense to me with at least 30 or 40 hours of German under my belt!

So Linguaphone were there with vinyl and presumably shellac before, and migrated their courses over to tape and cassettes.

I remember putting a lot of un-guided effort into learning Swedish back then. I somehow found a pen pal, Eva in Uppsala, but I suspect she found my attempts at her mother tongue excruciating.

I still treasure an anthology on Sweden which I suspect was probably translated from the original French into English and published by Vista Books.

My favourite part of the book was a poem – guaranteed to make a young teenage boy fall in love with Swedish.

Ever since I have had a soft spot for books featuring many black and white photos.

It’s hilarious looking through old language courses where they refer to things people don’t do much anymore…

You can understand why absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco found language phrase books such an inspiration. In Hugo’s ‘Swedish Simplified’ which is undated but clearly pre-war,  a random sequence of bland conversational statements and questions…

The Duolingo app has turned language learning into a game where you earn ‘lingots’ the more you learn and you get rewarded for streaks of sequential days of learning and practice. A strength is the bite-size lessons so that even a spare minute or two can provide a sense of accomplishment (and points towards daily goals!) You can use the app on your phone or the computer.

The app presents graded vocabulary and grammar without spending too much screen time explaining the grammar. Grammatical notes are presented, but I sense the assumption is that through repetition the principles can be learnt by osmosis. I am more of a traditional and systematic language learner so I feel the need to make notes as part of the learning process. But the resources including pronunciation and hints are excellent. On their own, I’m not sure how long the learning would last. Supplementary activities and material and an active level of note-taking and organising of the info presented in each section must help you retain more of the material. The daily prompts to get back into the app are also working to keep your commitment up.

Depending on how I progress with Swedish I also plan to use the app to revise and refresh my very lapsed skills in French, German and Portuguese.

The other plus is that the app has developed large active communities of learners who point the rest of to some very useful online resources such as Sveriges Radio’s ‘Radio Sweden på lätt svenska’ (in easy Swedish).

There are of course a number of other online language learning tools to explore: LiveMocha, Memrise, Anki, Clozemaster, Lingua.ly, ReadLang, Busuu, Babbel, Byki, Forvo, RhinoSpike, Hello Talk, Lang-8, Hi-Native, and Polyglot Club.