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.…
Memoir
7 posts
On the Long Quiet Middle
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 I Have Been Drawn To
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
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
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
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
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.…