Summer ChangSenior Product Designer | Mobile & iOS Products, Independent Consultant · Senior Product Designer | SaaS · Onboarding, Navigation, Checkout/Booking | iOS, Web, Voice Agents

Can an app reignite your passion for a childhood language?

12 Mar 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:57

In this short YouTube excerpt, two speakers discuss a 50‑day journey of learning Japanese. Speaker A mentions being pushed to converse with strangers and shares a list of useful keywords. They highlight Duolingo’s mascot Lily as a key listening‑practice aid, describing how Lily’s personality resonates with them. Inspired, Speaker A opens Adobe Illustrator, manually redraws Lily by breaking the blurry source image into hair, eyes, and mouth sections—avoiding the tracing tool—and completes the illustration in about 20 minutes, planning to animate it later. The segment showcases personal motivation, practical language‑learning tools, and a creative side project that ties the app experience back to the learner’s passion for Japanese.

I've been learning Japanese for 50 days.
Forced to talk to people I don't know. In case you care, here are some keywords you should know.
It's been quite a journey. Lily, the character on Duolingo, has been a great help with my listening practice. But let me tell you, her vibe and personality, I'm totally feeling it. It's just so cool. I thought, why not try to create her animation? I opened up Illustrator, started sketching out the lines and colors. Since the image was kind of blurry, I couldn't use the tracing tool. I broke it down into sections like the hair, eyes, and mouth. It took me around 20 minutes to recreate her, and it was a blast. I still need to work on animating her, but the result turned out pretty good.