I won’t really go into great or mighty detail about the ins-and-outs of Duolingo. But, there is a regular exercise where you repeat back a phrase it says to you — and has shown on the screen, as above — and then it…judges. I’m not precisely sure how, but it highlights a number of words that you said right versus not and then if you get a certain percentage of words or certain key words correct then it passes you. It’s something that can be very useful to practice while learning a language.

But, it’s often quite buggy. At least on my phone. Sometimes it fails me before I can speak. Sometimes I get a pass despite mumbling. I have occasionally had to figure out how to say the word incorrectly in the “expected” way to get it to register I was speaking.

THEN, Space Pilgrims, we have the phrase: Zij is zeventien.

It’s one of those Dutch phrases that I think is pretty immediately understandable by folks who can read English, but let’s save that for half a second down the road.

It failed me with that a week or so ago. I passed all the other glitches and mistakes I made, but not that phrase. There’s a place where you can visit your past mistakes and correct them — it’s a bit odd since you tend to do that in the lesson itself, but it’s a nice way to see things that maybe tripped you up — and it has sat there the whole time. No matter how I say it, it doesn’t register. I have recorded Duolingo itself saying it. I have used translation text-to-speech apps to say it.

I even one day, this past week, reached a near breaking point where I just shouted it in a variety of pronunciations.

Zij is sayvayteen.
ZAY ES SEVENTY!
ZI AS ZEBENTAN!

Etc.

It was only after I had had my several minute shouting match at my phone that I realized that my windows were open, and drapes pulled back, so it was quite probably audible to anyone walking by on the street (and our neighbors) that I am shouting variations of “Zij is zeventien!” on loop.

Which meant I was shouting, in Dutch, “She is seventeen!,” on repeat. For minutes. And anyone who glanced into the window would have seen me holding my phone while doing it.

I would like to apologize to my fellow Americans abroad that I am doing absolutely nothing good to improve our relationship with the lovely Belgian people. Whoops.

Bonus fun fact, though: If I tell Duolingo that “I can’t speak right now” it auto-passes the exercise for 100%. Which I 100% abuse on almost daily basis to get all the dang Daily Missions speed cleared.