Life

Information for new parents is a f**king mess

A woman is peeking down into a baby sling worn under her coat, inside, unseen, there is a sleeping baby. They are stood on a wintry beach.
My daughter and I on Gyllyngvase Beach, Falmouth, earlier in 2023.

What baby sleeping bag tog to clothing amount should your baby have when their room is 22C. Or 18C? Should you just have them in a nappy if it’s 26C in their room? Is it best to use baby sleeping bags or loose-fitting baby blankets?

My search Google search history was full of questions like this until I recently purged it. Finding answers to those questions and myriad of others since becoming a parent has been, generally a nightmare. Why? Because information for new parents is a f**king mess.

I have been drowning in a swamp of information.

It started in pregnancy

All in fairness though, obtaining sensible information about anything was already a struggle back when I was pregnant. The number of things I was considering buying or using that would contain a warning like “Please consult with your doctor before…” was staggering and by that point, I just wouldn’t bother buying or using the thing.

One such thing was a bag of bath salts I obtained by signing up for an online pregnancy pilates plan. Nearly every bit of advice I found through searching online said to talk to your doctor before using bath salts to relieve aches and pains.

But I had the equivalent of bath salts-related questions more than three times a week. If you take into account the average wait time for most England-based patients to get through on the phone to their NHS-funded doctors’ surgery (general practice, to my dear North American readers)… Well, I would have spent a ridiculous amount of time on the phone waiting to get in touch with my actual GP.

(The bath salts in question are still unused and I should probably just give them a go sometime after a workout now that I’m not pregnant.)

As a parent, I now have even more questions

Aside from tog versus clothing choices versus room temperature, a whole host of baby and parenting questions scramble in my head for answers daily. Here in England, you’re told you can call your health visitor (a type of specialist community nurse) or your GP when you have a baby or young child and need questions answered. Picking which is the right one to call can be a challenge in and of itself as it depends on the mix of the child’s health and safety versus immediate need, with danger to life being a 999 call for an ambulance anyway.

But when my baby was a few months old, I was concerned she wasn’t sleeping enough. The bags under her eyes every day were quite something.

I left a message for my health visitor.

It took three weeks for them to call me back, by which point I wasn’t sure if my daughter was still having sleep problems or not.

There was also the challenge of figuring out how much milk (roughly per day) my daughter should be drinking after we had to move to formula as I couldn’t breastfeed. No one was really able to answer that who was part of the immediate health team.

The internet, however? A different story. Numerous sites were offering advice on calculating amounts based on baby weight and age…

And none of them were NHS websites.

The backup for information: the NHS website

Now, in all of this so far, there is one website that does have a lot of information: the NHS website. It has a huge amount of information on things to do with looking after a baby, either through its Start for Life site or the general Health A to Z site. I used it for a lot of pregnancy-related questions and I’m using it now for baby-related questions I can find answers for when I search on Google or DuckDuckGo and it brings up NHS results.

A trusted resource, the NHS website has a lot of information. The problem becomes when it doesn’t have answers because that’s when my search results start to bring in less and less visibly trustworthy sources, including (and not limited to):

  • Brands that want to sell me something,
  • Mummy/mommy bloggers,
  • And various trusts or charitable organisations.

Take the main resource that is referenced for safe baby sleep in the UK. It’s not an NHS-run website.

It is the Lullaby Trust.

Snoozing on information

The trust is centred on reducing sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). From health visitors to the NHS website itself, the Lullaby Trust is referenced as the source for safe sleep info in the UK.

On Google, when searching around for information on baby sleep and safety using search queries “how to ensure baby sleeps safely”, the Lullaby Trust comes up at the top of results (DuckDuckGo favours NHS web pages first, these pages then link back to the trust). They then show up a few more times as well.

Now, the Lullaby Trust is a genuinely amazing and helpful organisation. But when you start to ask for practical information, they start to slip down the results and information starts to come from more from commercial entities and bloggers with commercial interests.

Enter questions about tog and clothing like “baby sleep bag tog clothing guide UK” and the majority of results will be commercial in origin with something like the Lullaby Trust wedged far down in the results.

This heavy bias in information sources exists for many, in my opinion, common parenting questions new parents may ask. Weaning is even worse when it comes to sources and their trustworthiness.

Raised through threads on Netmums and Mumsnet

Perhaps the worst and most persistent source of information that crops up during search often comes from the Netmums and Mumsnet forums. Mums predominately in the UK, ask all sorts of questions about their little ones, with the age of these questions and advice ranging from recent years to more than ten years ago.

It’s the freshness of this parent-to-parent advice that is a huge concern. Critically, advice from groups like the NHS about what are correct and safe ways to do various baby-related things changes over time. And then it takes a long time for this new information to be disseminated across communities.

For example, not long before my youngest brother was born in the early 2000s, the recommended age for weaning changed. In 2003, the World Health Organisation and NHS changed their recommendations on feeding and said that babies should be exclusively breastfed until they were six months old. Then from six months of age, you could start introducing your baby to solid food (this advice remains in place at the time of writing).

And while in this instance I have not encountered decaying forum discussions on weaning, I have found conversations from 2009 on Netmums around issues like baby formula and whether to switch to follow-on milk at six months of age.

What’s the official advice here at the time of writing? To quote the NHS:

Follow-on formula is suitable from 6 months, but ask a health visitor for advice first.

Follow-on formula should never be fed to babies under 6 months old.

Research shows that switching to follow-on formula at 6 months has no benefits for your baby. Your baby can continue to have first infant formula as their main drink until they are 1 year old.

The labels on follow-on formula can look very similar to those on first infant formula. Read the label carefully to avoid making a mistake.

NHS England

But perhaps worse still is the industry of mummy/mommy bloggers who have set up shop online to offer advice without full fact-checks, and the advertisers that make these blogs profitable.

Gambling with advice

Earlier this year it was reported by The Guardian newspaper that gambling firm Coral had paid for advertisements on various mummy and parenting blogs.

The advertisements put out were squarely aimed at new parents, presenting gambling in a light that broke the guidelines set out by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK on how to advertise gambling. As highlighted by The Guardian:

One post, ostensibly about baby food recipes, said: “If as a mum you can’t leave the house, then why not consider bingo online?

“You can click here to play Bingo online at Coral – this momentary break from childcare can prove beneficial.”

The Guadian, Gambling firm allegedly paid blogs to link new mothers to its online games, 14 May 2023

Personally, I don’t encounter many ads on people’s blogs because of my browser setup, but this incident is not exactly encouraging me to allow these bloggers to get ad revenue from me. On a related note, I don’t have any control over the ads that appear on this blog, but the people involved in this Coral scandal did.

As for the information itself on these blogs, well, once you get outside the realms of suggestions for sleeping and feeding schedules, or salt-free weaning recipes, things can get interesting, especially when you’re in the market for something.

Is this the right thing to buy? Is it even safe?

Due to the very big issue of fake and dangerous goods on Amazon UK and their dominance in online shopping, my desire to buy as little as possible through them, and the demise of Mothercare on the British high street (Mothercare in the UK is now owned by Boots and a ghost of its former self, with few places showcasing larger items like pushchairs): buying things for your baby, safe things, is quite hard.

It’s even harder when you’re not rolling in money and can’t just go to whatever bougie baby shop you find in-person or online and drop money on whatever overpriced thing you need.

And things are complicated further when you don’t know if something is the right thing to buy or ultimately safe.

Take baby carriers. There are plenty of these for sale online which don’t enable babies to have nice “froggy legs” or an “m shape” as described by baby-wearing experts. The reason for wanting your baby’s legs to be able to get into this shape is to help prevent hip issues. But lots of carriers are sold where they don’t promote that shape.

But the best place to get sling and carrier advice for babywearing is to see if your local area has something like a sling library with regular meetups. Apart from often letting you rent slings or carriers before you decide to buy one first or secondhand, sling meetups organised by groups like the St. Ives Sling Library (they’re local to Cornwall) normally have people trained in baby-wearing best practices and they can help you figure out how to safely do babywearing.

But nearly everything I have described here can be found on the open internet. The biggest source of information that is a f**king mess is Facebook groups.

Facebook groups are awful

Often private, the information exchanged between parents in these groups varies in quality from repeating the line of local health authorities to, well, you know, why we have so much hesitancy now about inoculating children against life-threatening and disabling diseases. I have actually stayed away from joining a lot of groups because the rules don’t state whether they allow or disavow such crackpot parenting advice.

And yes, books are still a thing

Parenting books are still a thing. Again, though, finding ones that have safe and up-to-date information is hard. I have got a few, but I have to take the information contained within with a pinch of salt much of the time.

What about tog versus clothing versus room temperature?

Okay, okay. So to answer that question, I suggest you check to see if the manufacturer of your baby’s sleeping bag has a clothing guide for sleeping bag tog versus room temperature.

Mine does and they also handily sell their sleeping bags with guides you can keep and reference. With the last lot of sleeping bags I bought, I cut out these handy guides and kept them near my baby’s room thermometer so that I could reference them at bedtime.

But mark my words, all, information for new parents is a f**king mess.

Standard
Books, Critical analysis and reviews, Life

American self-help books are not for me

A pile of self-help books

I have had a recent brush with self-improvement/self-help/personal development books. Call them what you will, books where prescriptions of mental and physical exercises are meted out in an attempt to meet a hierarchy of needs without addressing the foundations of those needs—would be a far more accurate description.

In the UK alone, 2022 saw the sale of personal development books cross the £50 million threshold. The market (not just books, everything) in the US (which comes with further trappings of seminars and a ridiculous array of crap you can buy) is estimated to be worth something like $9.9 billion in 2019 and it doesn’t appear to have shrunk in the interim, despite the pandemic.

The global self-improvement apps market in 2019 was valued at $2.5 billion. It is here, fair ladies, gentlemen, and lovelies of non-binary gender, that we set the rest of our story.

I subscribed to Headway

You see, last weekend, I had an ad pop up for the Headway app. It was a reasonable deal to try it out for three months at a reduced price. And somehow on setup, I ended up with it pushing self-improvement books over anything to do with fiction or non-fiction. I’m not sure why sign-up pushes you towards that when you can see from the above link that it has far more than self-help to offer.

Explainer: Headway is a platform that offers audio and written summaries of books. The summaries are usually under 20 minutes in length and are meant to be a way of getting key points and learnings from a book without having to read the whole thing.

No matter what I did with these settings, it pushed self-help over the rest of its library.

As you can see, when I start to scroll down the app it begins to offer links to less self-help content. But the top of the app is all self-help.

A week of regret

So I spent the past week mainly trying out self-help recommendations that on the whole made me want to vomit. Why? Because they were mainly dealing with how to approach problems that have been created by US society, economics and politics. Some of the issues have bled over to the UK thanks to certain political ideologies in our ruling classes since the 1980s, but on the whole, our challenges are not the same.

What I learned from the titles I tried to listen to is that people need the opportunity to meet their foundational needs (food, shelter, belonging), or else the information in these books is utterly useless. Also, listening to loads of self-help books in a short space of time is meaningless because they all either spout variations of the same themes or offer conflicting advice.

And I also learned that there was no point in subscribing to Headway if it was going to push meaningless crap at me first over other more meaningful content. That was a subscription canceled before it had the chance to renew at a more normal price.

(Yes, I am complaining about the effort involved in looking for non-algorithmically fed content.)

Now onto listening to more meaningful things or just reading in the first place. My reading pile hasn’t gotten much smaller, I can tell you that.

Standard
Life

I hate the new Duolingo update

What a difference eight and a bit months can make, eh? The last time I wrote about learning a new language (Danish/dansk), I was happy with how my first 500 days had gone. Much of this had taken place using the language app Duolingo but after a huge user experience update started to be rolled out over the past few months… I’m no longer happy with Duolingo. And Tuesday, 1 November 2022, sees the update I’ve been fighting with for the past month be rolled out to all users.

I hate the Duolingo update. It sucks. Here’s why.

1. I’ve lost control over how I learn within the app

While progress in Duolingo was previously only partly held back by how much progress you had made in the app, you could pick your own path through learning in the “learning trees”.

It’s not obvious from the above screenshot, but because I had completed food (for instance) I could choose which one of the next two units I focused on next. Often, I would focus only on one unit at a time and then move on to the next. Sometimes I would mix it up if I was dealing with two units that I found equally as hard or as easy.

Now, I’m forced to walk a completely linear path with revision of older lessons done by “personal learning” chosen for me by the app and set as an entire node on the path. Whereas before, I could just go back to an earlier unit quite easily and be rewarded reasonably well in gems for my time and effort. I can go back now to earlier units, but the rewards for doing so are far smaller payouts of gems.

I really don’t like this lack of choice.

2. The update messed up where I had gotten to

Because I had been learning, before the update, across several different modules, there was no way for the new Duolingo update to replicate this learning experience due to its linear nature. So, where I had made good progress with past tense but hadn’t completed it, Duolingo decided to discard all that progress I had made.

It did this just as I was getting used to signs of whether a word was being used in the past tense or not. How it then chose to throw me into learning made what I had learned already, confusing to recall and subsequently all over the place.

Also, because of how different the new setup is, I have no clear idea how I’m progressing now because it is so different.

3. Progress looks like it will take longer than before

The long wandering path of learning now sees me facing 45 units filled with ten individual modules/nodes of learning. Whereas before, the modules were split over far fewer levels.

For me, having to deal with what looks like a long singular journey of learning is more intimidating and off-putting than what was offered by the previous visualisation technique, which showed branches and shorter times to reach big milestones.

4. Where have all my writing exercises gone?

Throughout the previous version of the app, at least on the Danish course, I would be regularly asked to write various translations between English and Danish. While speaking is important in learning any language, I was trying to enjoy Danish media, so learning to read and write was also important to me.

Since the update, I only get full writing exercises during those “personal learning” segments and then it’s not very many and doesn’t switch between translating and writing.

Here are some examples of the older translation exercises I regularly did.

I was hoping to eventually read the Danish translation of Stephen King’s Carrie, but the removal of frequent translation exercises in Duolingo has me thinking that Duo isn’t the place to help me learn those skills anymore.

5. My Duo outfits are gone

Before the update, you could buy outfits for Duo, Duolingo’s mascot, to wear. And I bought every single one of the outfits available using the app’s in-app gems. They cost several tens of gems to several hundred.

Now the outfits are gone. Every single one.

This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it were not for the fact that I didn’t have the in-app cost of those outfits refunded. Instead, the gems that the outfits cost are lost to the update… an update that has been focused on making gems scarer than they were before. Why?

6. The update is clearly about driving microtransactions, a.k.a. in-app purchases

I was already a subscribed user of Duolingo before this update. (Earlier this year, subscriptions went from being called Duolingo Plus to being called Super Duolingo. It came with a new colour scheme for subscription elements.)

So, as a subscriber who paid out £80.39 for a subscription last December, I’m not exactly keen on giving Duolingo more of my money during a subscription period.

And things were working fine. I would be getting something like several dozen gems a day, along with 30-50 XP, depending on much time I spent on the app doing lessons (usually around 15 minutes). I had a daily learning goal I set in the app. So, I would say that I wanted to get something like 50 XP a day, and I’d be given so many gems depending on much progress I’d made towards this goal.

(XP is used in the “league” Duolingo has, with Diamond being the top league. The more XP you gain per week, the higher the chance you have of progressing up the league.)

With the update, XP payouts are lower per module than they were before, and you gain fewer gems for completing learning goals that aren’t set by you but are, in fact, set by the app. That’s right, self-set learning goals are gone, so the update has taken away yet another element of user control.

But how does this all equate to driving microtransactions?

Two things:

  1. Bundles to buy gems and time for a timed exercise challenge using actual money are now featured prominently in the app when you go into the shop tab.
  2. In Duolingo’s 2022 Q2 letter to shareholders, they talked about using another feature that’s being rolled out with the update, “Side Quests”, and using it to “increase revenue by encouraging more people to buy gems.”

(Thanks to Duo_is_sad on Twitter for pointing out this bit of the shareholders’ letter.)

I don’t have access to side quests yet. This brings me to my final point.

8. Duolingo focused on finding ways to gain more money rather than improving people’s learning experiences

Duolingo is ignoring, it seems, nearly any and all criticism they receive about this update. I get trying to make more money. They have shareholders, after all.

But I hate the cheek of them acting like it’s good for users:

Duolingo has carried on like it’s business as normal since the update started to be rolled out.

And I hate that they invested time and money in this update, invested my subscription on it, on stuff that hasn’t made my learning experience better. Because ignoring the linear path crap for a moment, as a Danish learner, I have far fewer features than someone learning French.

Danish subscription learners, along with many other subscription learners learning different languages, are being charged the same subscription costs as someone learning languages that are far more fleshed out.

Features Danish doesn’t have:

  • Stories (where you walk through a conversation and type appropriate replies). Stories were added to iOS in 2019.
  • Grammar tips (tips about grammar) or lessons that call out aspects of grammar.

There might be more Danish doesn’t have but I don’t have time to go starting up a dozen different language courses in Duolingo to find out. As I summarised this on Twitter:

I have cancelled my annual Duolingo subscription

Once my subscription runs out in December, I won’t be renewing it. I’ve already set it to not renew. I’m working on moving away from such a gamified learning experience when it comes to languages.

Currently, I’m looking at Memrise and Babbel to take over as my main language-learning apps.

Ideally, I’d also take part in Danish lessons with actual Danish-speaking humans, but as I’m about to have a baby, that needs to wait. There’s nowhere in Cornwall, England, that seems to be offering in-person courses on Danish, so I’d likely have to look for online courses run by UK FE or HE institutions.

I’m not going to give up on Danish. I’ll have been learning Danish for two years later in November. It’s just clear to me that Duolingo isn’t worth my time to keep it as a daily fixture in my life, as it’d rather I bought gems than learn in a way that suits my needs.

EDIT: If you’re also peeved by the update there is a Change Petition you can sign about it.

Standard
Critical analysis and reviews, Films

I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much while watching a film. It’s been too long, obviously, but Nicolas Cage’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is that kind of meta treat that only comes along every so often.

It stars Cage as himself in a tongue in cheek critique of his career as he gets an appearance gig for a multi-millionaire out in Spain. Nothing is as it seems (of course) and he ends up playing himself, playing himself as he acts through one of his toughest parts to date. It is a meta film with a high dose of parody.

There’s a midlife crisis, parenting, questions about career choices and friendship. Plus action. All while Cage uniquely sends himself up using Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script that could only have been written after watching a lot of Cage movies.

I suppose if you’ve not watched at least a handful of Cage films, then you might be hard pressed to enjoy his latest outing. And if you know nothing about his personal and professional life that is out there in the public domain, you might also struggle with some of the film’s plot points.

(And if you’ve never watched any of Cage’s films, you should probably rectify that. Like, go do that right now. Maybe start with Face/Off, followed by Raising Arizona and a side of Mandy, but that’s just to start with.)

One thing I did find myself thinking is that it reminds me a lot of The Disaster Artist but the big difference here is that I’d willingly watch any of Cage’s films. But The Room is not something I ever really want to see again.

Those of us who live for Cage “Going full Cage”, this film completely delights… And made me want to rewatch/watch some more of his extensive filmography.

You need to see “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”

Aside
Films, Life, TV

What I learned from 500 days of learning Danish

On Saturday, 12 March, I hit 500 days straight of learning Danish through the language app Duolingo. But why am I learning another language? What inspired me? How am I learning? What’s the plan going forward? What have I learned beyond telling a zoo keeper that a tiger eats my future husband? (Tigeren spiser min mand!)

The Venn diagram of events that led me to me learning Danish

There’s a pretty simple explanation as to how I ended up leaning towards learning Danish over another language.

Step one: end up a Fannibal

Post GISH (the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt) 2020, I was gently nudged into a rewatch of Bryan Fuller’s version of Hannibal. Those who listen to my Nerds Assemble podcast will know how that went.

I dived deep into a fandom that is still going strong for a show that hasn’t had a new season since 2016 (and yes, I am one of those people who still hopes for a season 4). Through this dive and ongoing obsession, I well and truly became a Fannibal, who not only liked Hannibal but the filmography of the show’s two main stars.

Now, watching Hugh Dancy’s back catalogue (he’s a Brit who played Will Graham) is a lot easier for me as someone who has English as a first language. (He’s done a bit in French, but mostly sticks to English.) But for Mads Mikkelsen (who plays Hannibal) and his volume of work that goes far beyond the Hollywood titles that nearly always see him play some variation of a villain?

Some of it is in French, some German, but the majority of it is in his native dansk.

And while I don’t ever expect to be completely fluent in Danish, it’s nice not having to completely rely on subtitles (and pick on nuances that get lost in translation).

I can’t remember quite which scene, but there was one in Druk (a.k.a. the Oscar winning Another Round) where the English subtitles didn’t quite match what I was hearing in Danish and changed the emphasis a little. Anyway.

Mads has been in a lot of Danish productions, and through interactions with Fannibal Twitter I decided to get to know them alongside Hugh’s previous work.

(Did you know that Fannibals have a term for discussing the rest of Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen’s back catalogue and having all sorts of fanworks where their various characters “encounter” each other? It’s called the Hannibal Extended Universe or HEU for short.)

Step two: be in the middle of the apocalypse

C’mon, you know what I mean. Begins with C, ends in D and has devastated the globe?

Followed up by other global events of a humanitarian disaster level that are shaking up everyone’s trust in institutions, friends, family and even neighbours?

Yeah, a lot has happened since 2020. (Though 2016 was probably the point where the darkest timeline really took hold, let’s face it.)

Step three: be aware of your need to stop doom scrolling

Boy, while I do tend to keep myself on top of world events there’s only so much I can take in and stay sane.

While March to the start of October 2020 saw me doing a lot of doom scrolling, there came a point where I was feeling like there was something else I’d rather do while on my smartphone. Something healthier for my sanity and meaningful to me (feck off doing it for future employability, and so on and so forth, because not every minute of my day needs to be “productive”).

Perfect opportunity to learn Danish

It helps that I had previously learned German for about seven years between secondary school and two years on the International Baccalaureate. Not that I am fluent in German, I can read it, listen a bit, but I am crap at speaking it.

With this background and all the above events coalescing in my life, it seemed like a good time to learn Danish.

There are many language apps out there

Depending on how you learn and why you’re learning, there are a lot of ways that you learn a language like Danish. It’s not supported on all language apps out there but it is on the following:

I haven’t looked further than these three and if you have any suggestions, please do share them.

And if you’re in Cornwall and have a Cornwall library card, the card gives you access to a free app where it’s possible to learn a level of Danish suitable for a holiday. (Based elsewhere? Your local library service likely has free-language learning resources you can use too.)

What I learned from 500 days of learning Danish

Here is a list of things I learned that aren’t just random Danish words.

There are bits I like about Danish as a language

There are similarities between Danish and German which helped me not be too scared by a third language. And there are things that Danish does that I prefer over how German handles things, including:

  • “The” being part of words (it varies but I love it), while still having a separate word for “the” when you need it. So, tigeren is “the tiger” with en denoting “the”.
  • The use of English swear words (makes cursing easier) and some intriguing ones of their own.
  • How less formal than German, Danish is as a language. And it’s far more to the point in my opinion as a result.

However, I have grown more appreciative of just how much more slowly spoken German is as a language compared to Danish. And wow, can Danish get fast.

There are also some similarities between English and Danish, which I find helpful.

It’s worth learning about the culture a language comes from as well as learning it

Learning about culture as you study a language helps you understand why certain phrases exist, where the important elements of a sentence come into play. And it just makes it all far more memorable when you don’t have a native speaker to talk with and you’re not living in the country.

I went on two language exchanges when I was studying German in school and the internet hardly existed as it does now. So, opportunities to learn about German culture were limited and it definitely made it harder to learn.

Today, there are so many opportunities to learn about the culture for a language as you learn it, largely thanks to the internet. That opportunity is super important in a world where travel is not always easy.

What I’ve used to get a bit of Danish culture:

  • Mads Mikkelsen’s back catalogue of Danish films
  • Danish language TV shows like Rita, Borgen, The Chestnut Man on Netflix
  • What The Denmark podcast, which is literally a show all about understanding Danish culture
  • Books like The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell (which was recommended to me)

And if you have any recommendations, lemme know.

I’ve even got a Danish version of the Stephen King novel Carrie to read once I’m feeling more confident about reading in Danish. (I also have some dictionaries and a grammar book on hand.)

You don’t have to learn something just because it’ll lead to a new career

Learning Danish has cost me money and it’ll likely cost me more in future because some day I’d love to visit Denmark for a spell (apparently it might be possible to get there entirely by train, an idea that excites me immensely).

I’ve been asked numerous times during my 500 days if I am learning just because I want to work in Denmark or with Danish companies. These have never been my goals.

My main goal has always been to give my brain something to do and occupy my time in a non-stressful way. That helps me alleviate boredom and connect more deeply with the film career of a guy who is an amazing actor.

And then the deeper I’ve gone, the more I’ve wanted to know about a different country and its culture beyond that one man.

I like knowing and learning stuff for the sole reason it fascinates me.

But I am well aware that I also have the privilege of time and modest financial means to learn something new.

Learning something new takes time

Okay, this is more of a reminder for me, rather than something I learned. But I do swear people forget that it takes time and practice to get okay and then good at something.

I’ve encountered a fair few people in my life who give up on something because they spent an hour learning something and still can’t do it as well as someone who’s had years to hone their abilities. People who won’t learn something because they won’t be instantly good at it.

Whether it’s learning a new language, learning how to knit or learning how to decently cook… and on, and on.

Slow down. Expect to fumble words, to make holes or burn food. And then try again. You’ll get better with practice, so don’t be so hard on yourself if you don’t get something right away.

Here’s to 500 more days and beyond!

While I’ve been writing this blog post, Duolingo has popped up a reminder on my phone to remind me to take a lesson.

Later this year, for my birthday, I’m hoping to convince a few friends to have a Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen movie marathon with me. (Heads up if one of you is reading this.)

I’m slowly saving for that trip to Denmark.

So, here’s to 500 more days and beyond of learning dansk.

Skål!

Standard