There is a particular form of language practice that I have been doing for many years now: regular conversation lessons with native speakers, conducted online. It has been, in my experience, the practice that has shaped my speaking ability more than any other.…
An essay on the discovery that what I had been taught was Arabic was actually one Arabic among many, on the Levantine variety that has come to feel most like home, and on a household where both registers live alongside each other.…
Twenty years inside Latin American Spanish has produced a love that will not resolve. An essay on the films and tutors that revealed Spanish as plural, and the Bogotan tutor whose clarity has come to feel like home.…
Almost everything ever written about language learning treats it as a journey with an arrival. After twenty years inside Spanish, I have come to think there is no arrival — only a long middle that does not end, and that the middle is what serious language learning actually is.…
This essay is a reflection on what the practice of reading and listening to stories has taught me — why it has produced the most durable progress in any language I am working on, and the resources I have come to recommend.…
A reflection on the pull of the Romance languages, the threshold of unfamiliar scripts, the question of tonality, and the honest portrait of one language lover's inclinations — including the languages he has not learned, and likely will not.…
There is a particular quality of patience that learning languages required, in the years before the internet made everything available all at once.…
There is no orderly way to acquire languages across a lifetime. Looking back across the languages I have spent decades learning, what strikes me most is the variety of the entries: no two of them came in the same way.…