Learning languages was never on my to-do list. I grew up speaking Arabic and French natively, then English slowly shifted from a middle school course to an essential part of my life through movies, TV shows, and music. When my highschool offerred Spanish courses, I took one lesson and walked out. Three was enough.
But things changed when I met my husband, who also speaks Spanish. A word here, a sentence there, a honeymoon in Valencia, some YouTube videos, and I suddenly realized I could understand Spanish without trying. It was too close to French to be difficult. Something similar happened with Italian. Still, I needed lessons from a good language-learning app. So, I started with Duolingo, got bored with it, then tried Memrise, and fell in love. In less than three weeks, I was able to learn enough German to make it to Berlin and sort of understand all kinds of conversations around me. But Memrise changed over time — it got prohibitively more expensive, it nearly abolished the free tier, and a lot of the charm slipped away.
