When the pandemic began, I had already started poking around in languages. I took Dutch and French on the Memrise app in 2019, happy to get back in touch with a language I’d already studied, and one of a country dear to me. But I heard about Duolingo, and then the pandemic seemed a good excuse. Now a mere one thousand, eight hundred fourteen days later, I’m still going. Language isn’t easy for me – there are genders, grammar, and numerical systems which just wreck my mind. But, I like giving myself the opportunity to do a hard thing – and maybe fail? So, thanks, for this – the challenge of throwing myself into something I am not typically good at, and doing it anyway.
language
tell me:
a flash of eyes
a shift of the body –
so many ways that I hear you
speaking
I’m way behind you — only in the 800+ days, but I am grateful for the way Arabic breaks my brain on a daily basis.