Learn a Real Language as Well
Programming languages tend to be quite similar to each other, and they’re usually logically structured, which makes them quite approachable once you’ve learned a couple of them already. Regular languages on the other hand — are way more diverse than programming languages. There are certainly a lot of logic and structure in regular languages, but there’s also a heavy dose of culture and tradition mixed into it. Logic can get you quite far, but there are some things you’ll just have to memorize — whether they’re logical or not.
At September the 14th 2014, I registered at Duolingo, which means that I’ve been registered for a total of 681 days including today. Duolingo is a free language learning website which offers multiple courses teaching different languages. I’m a at level 6 in Spanish, but the language that I’ve really been focused on is German. As you can see from the picture above, I’ve just reached level 15 in Duolingo’s German course. It took 7 504 experience points to reach level 15, so I would imagine that the threshold for level 15 is at 7 500 experience points. Pretty much every lesson in Duolingo is worth around 10 experience points, so in order to reach level 15 I must have done about 750 lessons in total. Anyway, I actually went through the course a couple of months ago, but I’m doing daily exercises (the “Strengthen skills” button) in order to make sure that I get to remember as much of it as possible.
I’m constantly learning things about programming, but learning a regular language has probably been the most challenging project that I’ve embarked on. I’m far from fluent in German, and I’ll have to keep learning and practicing for some time to come before I can say that confidently. As I said earlier, regular languages aren’t quite as rational as programming languages, and there are things which you’ll just have to learn and memorize. Everything cannot be inferred through logical reasoning alone, which I’d say is quite humbling. So, if you feel like you need a good challenge — I’d recommend learning another language.
If you’re interested in learning another language, then check out Duolingo (which is free). If you want to go a little bit deeper, then I’d recommend Babbel which isn’t free, though more thorough than Duolingo is.