The Country of Countries
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.…
A.C. Maas
8 posts
On the Long Quiet Middle
7 min read
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.…
What Stories Have Done for the Languages I Am Learning
8 min read
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.…
What I Have Been Drawn To
11 min read
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.…
Before the Internet
9 min read
There is a particular quality of patience that learning languages required, in the years before the internet made everything available all at once.…
The Old Songs
10 min read
There is a thing about me that people who know me well eventually notice: I prefer the old songs. They have taught me what their languages sound like when used by people with command of them. A reflection on what music gives the language lover that other forms of engagement do not.…
The Cassette My Father Kept
6 min read
How a song I could not yet understand became the beginning of a lifetime spent learning languages. There is always a first time, though it is rarely the moment you think it is. The first class does…
How the Languages Came
9 min read
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.…