Claire Sutherland

Writing at Lingua Trove

About

My grandmother was Italian and never quite got around to teaching me. She'd drop a word or a phrase in the kitchen and I'd catch maybe half of it, then lose it before the next visit. I grew up with Italian somewhere in the family and nowhere in my actual head. Around 2019, I finally did something about it: opened Duolingo in the second bedroom I use as a home office and committed to actually learning this time.

Seven years of on-and-off sessions later: Italian sits at a functional survival level. I can order at a deli counter without panicking, read a menu, and follow a patient speaker if they slow down a little. I still can't always keep siamo and stiamo straight, but I no longer guess randomly. Spanish got a genuine month of attention before a Mexico trip that did actually happen. Japanese is mostly a recurring intention that has not advanced past kana recognition, despite being opened in at least two different apps.

I'm 36, a freelance UX writer. My setup is a converted second bedroom on Madison's near-east side: standing desk, secondary monitor for running app comparisons side by side, whiteboard wall-calendar with color-coded streak markers right next to the gap weeks I don't bother erasing. There's a framed Italian espresso print from Etsy on the wall, half-ironic. The monitor bezel has sticky notes layered several deep, vocabulary I kept meaning to review. Progress notes go in a physical notebook, the same one I use for client invoices, which is a filing system that says everything about how I work. Grammar drills are what I call eating my vegetables. I have said it enough times in enough posts that it has become my personality at this point.

My neighbor Deb teaches eighth-grade English at a local public school and has borrowed my Pimsleur login at least twice without apology. She asks reasonable but slightly deflating questions about whether any of this is working. I have opinions about the Pimsleur narrator in roughly the way you form opinions about a houseguest who has been around just long enough to get comfortable. I currently pay for two or three app subscriptions at any given time, not all in active use, and not cancelled because cancellation requires a decision I keep not making.

No linguistics degree. No teaching credential. No formal background in Italian, Spanish, or Japanese. What I have is the notebook, the subscription history, and more hours on these apps than I would like to calculate.

Posts by Claire Sutherland

Disclosure

Some outbound links here are affiliate links. A small commission comes my way when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only write about apps I have paid for and used long enough to have a real opinion, including the ones I stopped using. Full detail is on the editorial policy page.