I Wish I Were a Polyglot (Part 1)
"I wish I were a polyglot" was a phrase I used to include in my social media bios, gosh, a decade ago at this point. But it's a feeling that has cropped up for me again just recently. I like languages a lot and while they don't come super easily to me, I have some natural inclination towards learning them.
I studied Spanish all through high school and college and spent a semester abroad in Barcelona where all of my classes were taught in Spanish, including my Catalan class. (Studying a foreign language in a foreign language was an amazing experience.) I also lived with a host family with whom I spoke Spanish (and Catalan!) exclusively. When I got back to the US after studying abroad, I took a Spanish-to-English translation course at my university, which I found absolutely fascinating. On the first day of class, when I introduced myself (in Spanish), the professor commented, "Qué acento español!" (what a Spanish accent!) and I was thrilled. He spoke Colombian Spanish and was probably teasing me a bit for being that student, freshly back from study abroad having picked up a new way of speaking. Spanish isn't a terribly difficult language for native English speakers to learn to pronounce (unless they struggle with rolling their R's), but I worked hard to get my pronunciation to match the voices I heard around me in Barcelona and I was proud of the accent I had developed.
But then my Spanish skills languished. I used the language on trips to Ecuador and Spain in 2012 and 2015, and very occasionally with Spanish-speaking visitors when I worked at the Museum of Science in Boston. For about a year, I practiced for 15 minutes a day with Duolingo (and also started studying French, none of which stuck with me), but that was it.
And then... E got a job in Germany. Neither of us spoke any German, and I could have listed half a dozen languages I was more interested in learning than German, but Berlin was where the adventure was and so I switched my target language in Duolingo and learned my first sentence: Ich bin eine Frau. (I am a woman.)
Since 2018, I've found a lot to love about the German language from its absurdly long compound words (and its ability to turn basically anything into a new compound word) to its pseudo-anglicisms (words that aren't loan words from English, but sound like they are) to doch (my favorite German word, which I cannot explain in a parenthetical). Although my German pronunciation is still not where I'd like it to be, my mouth can finally wrap around most of the sounds that I found so baffling in the beginning.
I've invested a lot of time and energy into learning German and I've made a lot of progress, and usually I feel good about that.
This is going to seem like a non sequitur, but over the weekend E and I watched the new Disney movie, Encanto. (It was great; Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a bunch of the music and the song "Dos Oruguitas" had E and I both in tears.) The movie is mostly in English, but the characters sprinkle Spanish into their sentences and two of the songs are entirely in Spanish and the one that didn't make us cry is a total bop.
When we were done watching the film, E and I agreed that it made us wish we had moved to a Spanish-speaking country.
But Emma, you protest, it's a Disney movie with a vaguely Colombia-inspired fantasy setting. That's not a place you can move to...
To which I reply, yeah, I know, I'll explain what I mean in tomorrow's newsletter.