6 posts
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 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.…
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.…