I started learning my second language (Spanish) in my sophomore year of high school. I actually took two semesters of Latin before that which was my first introduction to learning a foreign language, but fluency wasn’t ever the goal for Latin. It taught me how to learn to pronounce words and sounds that felt unfamiliar to my mouth and how to conjugate verbs. It also taught me how to better understand English, since a lot of the things you do to learn a second language (like conjugating verbs) are often just instinctive for your first language. It came in SUPER handy when I found myself in a decade-long career in healthcare too, but fluency in Latin wasn’t really anything I was interested in. Anyway, after two semesters of high school Latin I decided I loved learning languages and signed up for Spanish 1. I ended up loving it so much I took all three levels of Spanish in high school, then every Spanish class offered at my junior college.

In university, I attempted to major in Speech Pathology for a year before I finally realized that wasn’t what I was passionate about and switched to a Spanish major with a minor in education. After I graduated, I spent about a decade in jobs that allowed me to use my Spanish to help patients and customers in healthcare settings, and eventually I had my favorite job I’ve had so far: teaching Spanish to elementary kids. Every time I got to use Spanish at work I was exposed to all kinds of accents and dialects in person and on the phone. Being in a healthcare setting added pressure to my fluency I hadn’t had in school, and then teaching it to kids added a whole new layer to it that you don’t really get from just being conversationally fluent. Language learning is a lifelong process, but I’m a a point now where I’d feel comfy reading a book in Spanish or living in a Spanish-speaking country by myself if I needed to.

I love Spanish. I love how romantic it sounds compared to English. I love that the adjectives come after the nouns instead of before them. I love the cultures of Spanish speaking-people and how colorful and joyful they are compared to the grey, tight American culture behind the English I learned first. I love it when my brain gets ‘stuck’ in Spanish or when I legitimately forget a word for something in English and can only remember the Spanish for it. I even love the false cognates and exceptions to the rules because somehow those make more sense to me than the rules of English.

More than any of that, I love how much studying a second language has pushed me to expand my mind and my world far beyond that which I was raised in. That kind of cultural education made things like travel (especially solo travel) and working in diverse environments a lot more fulfilling, and it makes word associations much more interesting. I get so excited when I learn a new word in Spanish and I can connect it to the Latin root it came from, then to the English word for it, then figure out how culture and historical events led to English and Spanish getting from the Latin root to the words they have for it today. Having the linguistic background I have has made a lot of otherwise normal conversations a very specific kind of real-life crossword puzzle.

Now, I’m learning my third language and I can feel all of that happening again. My brain often gets stuck in Spanish because Italian is so similar I sometime switch into Spanish mode and don’t realized it. I can also see a little bit of each language and culture in the others. Italian is the romance of Spanish with the structure of English and the roots of Latin. It’s sharp and loud when it needs to get a point across, but it can be a soft and gentle when talking about a loved one or the way the sky looks just before the sun goes down. I love how the words often reflect what they’re talking about, like how “affretarsi” means “hurry up” and feels like being poked in the ribs by an impatient grandmother when you say it.

Learning a third language that’s so closely related to the ones I already have in my head has also taken the whole “irl crossword puzzle” thing to a whole new level. In Italian class the other day we learned the word ‘parlare’ which means ‘to speak.’ Immediately, my brain went “oh, parlare, parlor, speaking room?” and I wrote it down in my notebook to look up later. As it turns out, both words do come from the Latin root “paraulare” which means to speak or converse. So a parlor is literally a speaking room. As my brain made that Latin-Italian-English connection in class I also wondered how we got from there to the equivalent Spanish word being “hablar” so I looked that up too. The root of hablar is the Latin “fābulāre” which is the much less formal way to say to speak or converse (it would be more like chat). So the fancy room the rich people had to host their visitors in got the more formal root word, and the language that developed from Spanish conquistadors verbally imposing their language on the indigenous populations they deemed socially below themselves got the more familiar, colloquial root word. Culturally & historically speaking, that’s a fascinating distinction and the domino effect we get from things like that makes my word nerd heart SING.

Having so many words from so many different languages live in my head all the time does get confusing and overwhelming, especially when I need to order my caffè but I can’t remember the Italian word for milk because leche is stuck in the way and won’t move. But learning about a new culture and the history behind it through the way the people communicate with each other is an incredible experience. I’ll never be able to fully express how thankful I am for every Latin and Spanish teacher I had who helped me discover this unique way to be a human.