Precerpt from My 20th Language: 🌱 My First Language and the Path to Others
English was my first language, the one I absorbed without effort as a child. It was the language of my family, my community, and my earliest immersion in the world. I didn’t study it at first; I lived inside it. Every year, my understanding deepened as I listened, spoke, and eventually read and wrote. When I entered school, English became not just the language I spoke but the subject I studied. Teachers corrected my spelling, my grammar, and my word order. I learned that sentences had structure, that verbs carried tense, and that word placement could change meaning entirely. Grammar became a framework I could lean on, even if I didn’t realize at the time how valuable it would be later. That foundation in English proved indispensable when I began learning other languages. With Germanic languages, I found familiar ground in the shared grammar framework. With Romance languages, the gift of 1066—the Norman Conquest—was still alive in English. So many words had already crossed i...