Game of Thrones season 7: Taking High Valyrian courses

In honor of season 7 of Game of Thrones, you can now take courses in High Valyrian on Duolingo, and we’ve taken the first few just to get the experience.

Thanks to The Verge, yours truly learned a few days back that it would be possible to take lessons in Game of Thrones‘ High Valyrian language starting today on Duolingo. Now that I have managed to get through the first five sections, I think it’s best to sum my experience up thusly:

Upon learning that High Valyrian has four grammatical genders (Wikipedia tells me some real-world languages do too, but hey), I loudly exclaimed “This language is made up!” And then I realized all languages are made up, which is not the kind of profundity I expected to get out of all of this.

Frankly, the language is a little bonkers and perhaps not well-suited to Duolingo’s bite-sized lessons. Taking the courses on the web application, I felt like the grammar was particularly difficult, because High Valyrian has multiple cases and the aforementioned four genders, and Duolingo sticks the actually pretty useful notes at the bottom of the section instead of incorporating them into the lessons themselves.

I pretty much feel like this after taking five lessons, except I can’t even say the word for nostril:

Anyway, the lessons include a lot of fun little nods to the show. You’ll learn valar morghūlis and valar dohaeris, of course. Additionally, there are words for sword, knight, Unsullied … and Daenerys’ name. Ditto, in fact, with that of Jon. Is this a hint that Jon’s going to learn about his Targaryen heritage? Is he going to be getting language lessons from his aunt Dany or something? Probably not, but one has to wonder. If Jon learns High Valyrian, will that make him a dragon rider?

Next: Game of Thrones S7 red carpet: Our favorite looks

What’s your experience with High Valyrian? Let us know if you’re taking the courses!