First of all: the three winners of my paperback giveaway for The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall are J.O., A.L., and M.! Expect an email shortly to arrange delivery!

My brain is a garbage can of Latinate words, each one bleeding into the next.

I am constantly reciting Spanish - Portuguese - French triplets to myself: “already” is ya - já - déjà; “today” is hoy - hoje - aujourd’hui (the hui is the cognate syllable); “now” is ahora - agora - maintenant; “but” is pero - mas - mais; “early” is temprano - cedo - tôt; “close to” is cerca de - perto de - près de. Even so, my speech in each language is peppered with the wrong variety of mushed-up Latin.

Even more likely to become garbled in my mouth are words which are virtually identical except for the pronunciation: grande - grande - grand (pronounced, respectively, gran-deh, gran-jee, gran, all with a broad aw for that first vowel.) Getting the right number “seven” is like trying to spit a specific marble out of my mouth when my cheeks are full of them: siete (see-eh-teh); sete (seh-chee); sept (set).

It is good for my emotional well-being but not for my linguistic capabilities that I have cut myself off from most short-form video platforms. I have trained my Instagram algorithm to deliver a constant stream of news, art, cooking, stand-up comedy, and grammatical tips in the three languages I have (finally) made real progress in speaking and understanding; the overall effect on my brain of an hour of this mixed content is something like what I imagine listening to a bunch of drunk old Roman men slurring at each other in the wee hours after a long dinner party must have been like. (And like the end of a long dinner party, I end by feeling dizzy and disoriented.)

My coworkers and the Instacart shoppers in my store have grown used to my enthusiasm and misplaced syllables, I think. (I’ve written before about my slow and painful learning process.) Brazilian Portuguese, in my experience, tends to be spoken at the top of one’s tonal register; French and Spanish, toward the bottom. If I can start a sentence in the right register, I can often make it to the end relatively unscathed when chatting with a coworker (though not always.) I can, because it is my actual job, reliably describe where anything is in my store in Spanish, Portuguese, or French, without preamble.

I am probably a little too proud of that last, and painfully aware of the vast untraversed landscape of each language rolling out before me. I think, sometimes, about the thousands of books I have read in English, the thousands of words I have written, and, perhaps more to the point, the millions and millions of words I have spoken and heard spoken to me. My facility in my first language is both a help and hindrance to my grasping of these others: I long for the subtlety and grace I have ready to hand in English, and I am painfully aware of the decades of effort it took me to acquire that eloquence. And I do not know how else to proceed, if not step-by-painful-step.

“Bigode” is mustache (Portuguese); “ficar presa” is to become trapped (Portuguese); “on se reveille-là” is the phrase my Haitian coworker uses to end every short conversation in French. The young guys in the back and I hiss “chambón” (clumsy) at each other and grin as we pass each other with our carts full of trash cardboard and damaged groceries. I learned “navaja” for pocketknife while stocking chips; I learned “vacío/vazio” for empty after foolishly thinking I could port over “vide” from French.

I wanted — I still want, someday — to get my language skills to a point where I would be useful volunteering for a hotline like the one LUCE maintains in Massachusetts to keep track of and warn communities about ICE sightings, or the one BIJAN runs in order to connect the relatives of detained immigrants with legal resources. But I cannot imagine anything worse than someone who is frightened and traumatized by the abduction of a loved one or neighbor having to shepherd an awkward volunteer through a conversation in a language that volunteer doesn’t speak well.

And so: I am back to creeping toward fluency, word by word, phrase by phrase, conjugation by conjugation. Every day brings another clumsy, kind conversation, until such a point that I can be of use.

A reminder that I write books! You can find out about those books and where to buy them on my website!

On the slow and steady,

Sharon

P.S. What is a skill you have been working toward for several years? How have you gone about it?