How to revisit a language
And not worrying about having forgotten everything
It’s been a while since I wrote to you…it’s been a busy summer!
For so many years now, I’ve travelled to parts of the world I had never dreamed of visiting all because of my job as an international news reporter. In the last few years I’ve been to Ghana, Armenia, Romania, Thailand, Laos…and don’t get me wrong. I love it. I feel incredibly lucky. But it’s also always been a mystery to me that I haven’t had as many opportunities as I had hoped to visit countries where I speak a language I dedicated years of my life to learning.
I get asked a lot of the time by young journalists and linguists alike how to find a job where languages are useful, and the truth is that they’re as useful as you force them to be. In my jobs at VICE and at the BBC, I can count the amount of times a colleague asked me to speak or translate something on one hand. At the very beginning of my career, I was lucky to be an assistant on a documentary where I had to interpret Arabic everyday - but after that, my language skills have apparently been fairly unimportant to my employers.
Instead, I found I had to go looking for language-speaking opportunities instead, and I tried to use my language skills to find original stories, and it was combining my Spanish and Arabic with my social listening skills that led to reports on the ‘miraculous’ church altar during the Beirut explosion, the BBC’s first Instagram-first documentary, which was about brujas in New York, and it’s also how I exposed a horrendously misinformative hymen repair account on YouTube based in Algeria for VICE. I essentially made my own language opportunities, rather than expecting them to come top-down from bosses.
Now that I am freelance, I’m the boss, so it’s up to me to find or make opportunities myself. It is why I was in Oman for so long this summer; I applied to a journalism grant to do some reporting there, and I also got in touch with a language school in the capital to see if I could make some content for them in exchange for language lessons. It meant that for the first time since my undergraduate degree I got to spend a considerable amount of time in the Middle East, and finally speak some Arabic again! I know I have forgotten so much since I studied it, and I was desperate to bring some of it back to me.
For anybody else looking to reconnect with a language soon, I’ve got five tips for you if you too fancy a week or two revisiting a language you haven’t practiced in a long time.
Carve out some time. With annual leave restrictions, one week away might be all you can nab. But if you can spend two or even three weeks reviving a language, you’ve got a much better chance of reawakening that dormant knowledge. Your brain needs a chance to ‘log in’ again.
Prep before you travel. I took Arabic classes for months with Natakallam, a programme I really admire, online so that I wouldn’t arrive in my first lesson in Oman starting completely from scratch. I basically revived my Arabic ahead of the dedicated period of Arabic revival I was preparing for myself.
You’ll be surprised at what you can remember. Just because I might have forgotten how to say some words, I hadn’t considered how many words I still somehow remember in a corner of my mind. It meant that I was understanding a lot more of what people were saying to me at first, before I remembered the words myself to then re-introduce to my speech.
Don’t be disheartened at any language level you might have lost. Language learning and living is not linear - our lives change, our priorities change, and our language contact changes. Any attempt to reconnect with a language is valid, and making mistakes is as important a part of language learning as it is making no mistakes!
Make lots of notes. In my notebook, it is lovely to flick through the vocabulary I learned in Oman, each tied to particular conversations or moments that I can now connect with memories. This is a powerful device in language learning - being able to tie words to moments and building an emotional connection to them - and nothing is better than a short period of ‘language revival’ to give yourself those opportunities
Today I published my tomato eatymology recipe, discussing how many European languages vary between a tomato sounding word or a pomodoro sounding word. Tomato comes a little more directly from the Nahuatl tomatl, as the tomato is native to the Americas - whereas pomodoro comes from pomo d’oro - a golden fruit or apple - as the first tomatoes that were introduced to Europe were yellow.
It’s one of the most fun hands-on recipes that I’ve done so far in the series and - assuming you take safety very seriously - I’d actually really recommend doing it with kids if you want to get them into cooking and languages. My fiance and I had a great time skewering them over the flames. Oh yeah…my fiance! I forgot to mention I am now engaged :) !!! A wedding and bridal etymology newsletter I’m sure will turn up at some point over the next year. Anyway, the tomato recipe.
Believed to be the first Italian tomato sauce recorded, Antonio Latini in his 17th century cookbook talked about a “salsa di pomodoro alla spagnola”. All he uses are tomatoes, onions and thyme, which he recommends are cooked ‘on embers’. You could go 21st century with a frying pan - I chose to do something a little more exciting…
To adapt it, I recommend:
Gathering as many yellow cherry tomatoes you like - at least 20. I grew mine in the garden and they were delicious.
Dicing half a brown onion
Also buying some thyme (I love lemon thyme), some skewers, some foil, and a pasta of your choice
Heat some olive oil and put your onion in a pan. Cook till golden - about 15 minutes.
Begin to skewer your tomatoes. When ready, take some foil and put it around your hobs. This is because you’re about to possibly make quite the mess, depending on how well your tomatoes behave.
Take the tomato skewers and heat them over the flame of the hob till charred. If you’ve got lots of cherry tomatoes, this might take time - hence why I recommend an extra pair of hands! Remember to be safe around the open flame.
Add the cherry tomatoes to the onions’ pan, with a little of the thyme.
Boil water and cook your chosen pasta in it.
When the pasta is cooked, drain it and add it to your tomato sauce. Buon appetito!