Level 2: Foreshadowing and Signposting

A cartoon zombie appears on screen asks you to drag tiles with English words on them into the correct order to translate the phrase tú puedes morir: You can die. The tiles showing the words he, you with a lowercase y, and leave remain unused. There is no tile with might or with could. This is a version of the syllogism about all men, including Aristotle, being mortal. This is the philosophical debate that ends defining a living being as an organism with the capacity to die, distilled for people with still-small vocabularies. Perhaps full syllogisms and medieval philosophy come in more advanced lessons.

Outside the walls of the old city of Toledo(, Spain, not Ohio), down a steep earthen ramp that runs alongside terraced garden plots from the twelfth century that with careful tending still produce, is a spigot below a small, rough-hewn granite plaque. In chiseled-in and painted-red letters it reads: Aqua fons vitae est. Here, on agricultural land, do I translate water is the source of life, or potable water? Perhaps aquavit. Take a sip, get it wrong, and you can die.

Level 3: Learning To Complain About Beverages

— How do you explain the flavor of this coffee?

— The bar is run by a bishop. He looks like a crepe. He has two hearts. He has nine fingers. A scandal began at the church: I did not know that Jesus spoke Irish. The bishop sent a pineapple to the queen. There are elephants in the kitchen. The plumber is in the fridge. I keep stopping and starting.  The cheese is old. The wine is from Vienna. The tomatoes are on the balcony.  Are you saying we have no onions? No, the peaches are sweet. The pig eats here. We have only two ducks. One duck drinks wine. The badger is drunk. Is that legal? The dog is walking toward the waiter. There is a snake in my boot. There is a knife in my boot. The motor is broken. A butterfly keeps the books.

And that is how I explain the flavor of the coffee we serve here. 

Level 5: Identifying Local Wildlife

There is a piranha in my bathtub is not such a useless phrase to learn living in my neighborhood. Two young-teen boys stand on the southeast corner of Bleecker and Mercer inadvertently imitating a midcentury tee-vee host saying things they think sound authentic and adult for the strange situation they have created. One of the boys has a fishtank at home in his family’s duplex and he and his friend have fished out a piranha and put it in a bucket with some of the aquarium water that desperately needs to be cleaned. They ball-point wrote a sign saying: “Free Piranha.” All that is left for them is to act very surprised to have found a free piranha in a bucket on the corner: “Only in this city would you see something like this!” I text a colleague who knows something about tropical fish and everything about the history of penal incarceration in Mexico. I should probably call the SPCA. Thanks to Duolingo, I can explain the situation to them in Swedish: Det finns en piranha i badkaret. It’s not my bathtub, but I think I could at least get the main point across: Badkaret ligger på hörnet av Bleecker och Mercer. My cell phone chimes with the sound of a six-pee-em network news program announcing an alert from Citizen: Reports of a large snake in a bucket on Bleecker and Sullivan. Unconfirmed reports that it is venomous.