My grandpa, when I was little, brought me back a book from one of his work trips to Japan. It was The Little Mermaid in Japanese, and I still have it. This encounter with a script and a language I didn’t know, that no one around me knew, was formative in that it made me curious but also aware that there were going to be things in the world I’d either have to work to understand or accept that I couldn’t.

I am the weird one now who always buys people’s new babies books in various languages—whatever is around, based on wherever I am—because I think it’s good for the brain, this early kind of encounter. And it’s good for my brain, now, to keep dabbling in language and getting as far as I can, or as far as I feel like. “Just go ahead and suck,” as the wise Charli XCX has said. “It’s your life.” I think I’m finally beginning to understand that it’s ok to suck. I’m giving into sucking.

When I was in high school, I randomly learned how to count to ten in German (inspired by Rammstein and enticed by its severity). When our Spanish teacher, Señora Scala, asked if anyone could count to ten in another language, I eagerly volunteered my studied German accent and, following my performance, a wide-eyed girl next to me asked, “Are your grandparents from Germany?”

If I hadn’t been 15 and stupid, I could’ve learned the lesson then, but it’s only occurred to me now: Language doesn’t have to be a serious referendum on both my identity and my intelligence. It can just be something I dabble in, to whatever extent I’m capable. My husband knows this, and it’s why he’s always eager to use the, like, three words he knows in Arabic whenever possible. I love learning the patterns of grammar, of sentence structures; I am extremely interested in what appears on the page and how, which makes sense given my work. I hate trying to remember the genders of things that in English have no gender, like pizza and cat. I love how learning a new language opens me up to so much new music as I tune my ear.

My anxiety about speaking Spanish, about not being perfect in Spanish, has long been an issue in my life, as it has been for a lot of what they formally call “heritage speakers” and we jokingly call “no sabo kids.” Our expectations for ourselves and the expectations of others make it a far more heavy psychological burden, and in Puerto Rico specifically it’s extremely common for people to switch to English if they detect even a whiff of a non-native accent. Never mind that I get through every interaction in which I speak Spanish perfectly fine, that I understand everything unless someone catches me off-guard—I’m in my own world in English, too; it’s not an attractive quality!—that I read it, and that I can watch movies in the language without subtitles: that, to me, isn’t enough, because I hit a wall when it comes to socializing in it. I’ve never been able to find my footing as me in Spanish; I just know how to play the role of Alicia at the doctor’s office or the café. She’s very bouncy and agreeable, which isn’t how I actually am at all. 

But I’ve started to casually try to learn French, and it might have given me the key to my language anxiety—what counting in German could have provided all those years ago. If you’re struggling with your main second language in a similar way, the solution might be to add another one that you don’t feel like you need to perfect.

As a kid, when picking a language, it just made sense to go with Spanish, and I had a lot of unfounded confidence about it because of my heritage. My confidence was academically well placed (I got 100 on the Regents, ok, a New York reference) but I never had the opportunity for immersion until I was much older (I didn’t study abroad; I was working). In the U.S., most of our “foreign language” education starts too late and is too superficial to ever take root in a real way without that kind of experience.

Nonetheless, I’m obviously glad I studied it, and it’s helping me a lot now with French, which I had spent a lot of my life believing was simply too difficult for me to ever comprehend. Instead, I have so much fun with it, in a way I’ve never had fun with Spanish. In French, I feel free to fuck up—but I also feel free to simply try in a way that is, I think, letting me embody it better. And maybe by finding my way in French, I can become more myself in Spanish. Or I won’t—and it’s fine.

Davíd Garza put this song “Dead French Dudes” on his album Dream Delay, which came out in 2008. This song immediately became my ringtone because he sings in English, French, and Spanish about being afraid “to say the wrong words or use the wrong verbs” around the girl he’s into, who loves her dead French dudes. I’ve been collecting these little Easter eggs my whole life, pointing me toward a more expansive idea of what it means to engage with language. It reminds me of my friend Luis’s piece for Tomato Tomato, “El Difícil,” where he wrote about observing people trying and failing to understand a menu but having a laugh in their gestured communication along the way. (We published it bilingually.)

For me, for now, it’s enough to dabble. It’s ok to be mystified and fortified by the casual encounter. One never knows when a perfect sentence, fully formed, might emerge from some mysterious part of the brain. One never knows how the casual study is changing you without you noticing yet. Humility and curiosity go a long way.

The Desk Salon with Karmela Padavic-Callaghan & Joseph Osmundson, Moderated by Raechel Ann Jolie.

The Recommends… for the month, a roundup of
reading, watching, and listening.

The Monthly Menu roundup of recipes, eating, cooking, and drinking.

Tomato Tomato Issue 4