Language Academy

My Journey with Languages

I grew up in a monolingual household and, like most Americans, I took studied a foreign language class in High School that I never learned to speak (Italian). The first languages that I really loved were the languages I studied in graduate school: Koine Greek and Classical Hebrew. I learned these languages for the purpose of reading and translating texts so while these languages did start to build my linguistic muscles, by the age of 25 I still could not speak any foreign languages.

My journey with speaking other languages began when I moved to Greece in 2017 to do humanitarian work. Of course, I was living in Greece so Modern Greek was important for functioning in day to day life. But the people with whom I was working spoke Arabic and Kurdish which opened my eyes to Middle Eastern languages for the first time. I fell in love with the Arabic language and found that my study of Classical Hebrew helped me to learn Arabic more than Ancient Greek helped with Modern Greek.

The next few years of my language journey were defined by Arabic. I learned words and phrases every day from friends and made a lot of mistakes when I would try to speak. I used the brute force method of learning the Arabic alphabet by wr read and write Arabic through endless repetition of I found a yellow legal pad in my apartment and learned to read the Arabic alphabet through endless repetition of writing the letters. In the summer of 2019, I went to Amman, Jordan for a month of language school which completely transformed my experience of Arabic. I returned to Jordan at the end of 2019 for another month of intensive language school.

I met my future wife in February 2019. She was born in France and so I realized very quickly that the French Language was going to be a big part of my life. I visited France for the first time in the summer of 2019 without being able to speak at all. Starting in January 2020, French took precedence over Arabic in my language journey. In the summer of 2021, I did my first public speaking in French and by 2023 I was finally fluent (according to my definition) in French.

Before I realized it, Language Learning became something that I enjoy for its own sake. Language is beautiful. Grammar is something that holds together the language in a meaningful structure. Regional dialects and accents are charming. Every part of language fascinated me. Now, I always have “target languages” that I learn with some seriousness and “hobby languages” that I learn simply for the joy of learning.

Now that French has become part of my normal life (friends, books, music, etc.) I have returned to Arabic as my primary target language with renewed focus on fluency. My current hobby languages are Spanish and Russian. Because I know French, I am able to learn Spanish from reading and I am currently learning Russian sporadically through YouTube and other online resources.