It started with Zana and the Albanian lessons.
When I turned 40, I moved to Albania for a year to teach journalism. Once there, I immediately hired a language teacher. Language is a decoder ring; three times a week I sat with Zana parroting the goofy, stilted dialogue that is the Albanian equivalent of Look Jane look! See Spot run!
Zana stood no higher than my armpits, spoke no English and got down to business as soon as our appointed hour began. When I did well on my homework or mimicked a decent accent during oral pronunciation quizzes, Zana (which means fairy) patted my arm and smiled so widely her face became all teeth and gums. She had the mildly scolding, maternal air of librarians from my childhood, and her approval meant everything to me. It was one of the most powerful motivators I’ve had as an adult. Maybe I need the same set up with an accountant come tax time?
With Zana I had stumbled on my sweet-spot dynamic for learning a language as a grown up. It’s a simple minuet: A kindly woman who bears a resemblance to a librarian or my grandmother. And me in the role of the pliant student with a reservoir of mischief.
I worked hard at learning Albanian; the difficulty of the endeavor startled me. It vexed me. I took French in high school and continued with it into my first two years of college. French came easily and felt like a game, like a round of Scrabble with another part of my brain. As an adolescent, another language was music: the rise and fall, the unfamiliar sounds, the melody. It was singing without understanding the lyrics.
Mrs. Mahoney introduced me to Spanish when I was in fourth grade; living in Miami for almost 20 years filled in the rest through the osmosis of living there among the predominantly Hispanic population.
Those languages filtered in and took root when the coral reefs of my brain were still permeable clusters of plankton and larger parts of my personality weren’t predicated on mastery and certainty. As an adult, learning a new language means admitting to knowing nothing, practicing something I am lousy at in public, and submitting to being wrong. A lot. But learning a new language as an adult also feels like Bikram yoga inside my skull: It kicks my a**, and then it rewards me with well being in spectacular flavors.
After Albania I moved to Slovakia and Slovak lessons with Pani Sokirova. She had the feathery hair of an ’80s rock star and wore pink, frosted lipstick. Pani Sokirova had the same maternal vibe, that same slightly militaristic, no-nonsense approach. I tucked into my familiar role: I studied, I completed my assigned homework, and I tried hard for her approval. Nothing inflated me as much as one of Pani Sokirova’s hard-earned compliments. Or making her laugh with my malapropisms.
And now there is Anna. And Russian.
This language isn’t so much like Bikram yoga as it is like the Ironman Triathlon. New sounds, new words, new rules and a new alphabet. I hate it. And then I like it a little bit, but I mostly hate it because I am smart, but I’m not smart in Russian, and it’s hard, and I feel dumb when I look at my workbook and the sentences look like lines of smushed bugs.
We’re a month into my twice-weekly lessons. I’ve got about 30 vocabulary words under my belt and the fundamental arsenal of beginner verbs: to be, to have, to go. I’m just at the point where I am forming sentences on my own by selecting nouns from column A and pairing them with nouns from column B. Last week I gave one a try: Grandmother is hedgehog.
Anna’s entire face split open, and she fell into waves of raspy giggling that bloomed into deep laughter. I beamed. That’s a good one, she said when her laughter subsided. I beamed some more.
And that, comrades, is all the encouragement I need.
