Studying Toward Each Other

Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, my house turns into the world's smallest language school. Two students. Two languages. Opposite directions.

I'm learning Spanish — Colombian Spanish, specifically, from absolute zero. My husband is learning English. We each put in four hours a week, on the same nights, at the same time. I am conjugating verbs in a notebook while, somewhere across the house, the man who already speaks the language I'm sweating over is doing grammar exercises in the language I dream in.

Neither of us planned it this way. It just sort of… lined up. And now it's my favorite thing about our week.

Here's the strange part: we are each other's answer key. The person who could correct my homework instantly is in the next room. The person who could answer his questions without blinking is me. You'd think that would make it easy, but it mostly makes it funny, because during study hours we're both stubbornly in student mode — and a student who runs to the answer key every five minutes isn't studying, he's just visiting.

So I study. Properly. Lessons twice a week, flashcards in between. I have an app for the flashcards — of course I have an app, I build an app for everything now — with a cheerful robot voice that reads my Spanish back to me. We've named him Señor Robot. Señor Robot has no mercy and perfect pronunciation, which is more than I can say for his student.

And what a student. Six lessons in, here's my highlight reel:

I can walk into a restaurant and order like I mean it. La cuenta, por favor was an early trophy and I deploy it like a man who has never been prouder of four words.

I can haggle at a market. ¿A cómo están las arepas? ¿Me hace un descuentico? — "can you give me a little discount?" — is a real sentence I can produce in the wild now, along with my favorite Spanish word so far: la ñapa, the little extra a vendor throws in on top. A language with a built-in word for "a little extra, just because" understands something about life.

I scored 10 out of 10 on a quiz and was insufferable about it for a full day. My confidence said 4.5 out of 5. My husband has heard about the quiz. Colombia has probably heard about the quiz.

I still trip over the small stuff. I will produce a flawless bargain — discounts, plurals, the works — and then fumble a word like da at the finish line. My tutor notes say my confidence undersells my performance, which is a kind way of saying the goods are there and the swagger is still loading.

Meanwhile, across the hall, English is happening. I don't grade his homework either. Those are the rules of the house: during study hours, we're classmates, not teachers. We compare notes after. Sometimes we compare wounds.

People ask why I'm doing this — why now, why from scratch, why four hours a week like it's a part-time job. The honest answer is that language is where people live. My husband's world — his family, his jokes, the stories that only land right in Spanish — speaks a language I didn't. And mine speaks one he's still learning. Every lesson, the distance between those two worlds gets a little shorter. He's walking toward my side. I'm walking toward his. Somewhere in the middle there's a version of us that can say everything twice and be understood both times.

That's the whole project, really. Not fluency as a trophy. Just two people, same house, same nights, studying toward each other.

Class dismissed. Señor Robot is already asking if I'm ready for my next round.