I made a bucket list a while ago. On it was to learn a second language. I’m awed every day by my colleagues around the world who speak multiple languages. I’m inspired by their ability to drop into cultures, drop into countries, drop into conversations.

When I added this item to my bucket list, when I wrote it down instead of it just floating in my mind, I didn’t know what language I wanted to learn. It was some time around my trip to France last year, and I thought I might want to learn French. I love the sound of French: it sounds beautiful and elegant and chic. I also thought it would be practical to know for travel around France and Belgium, and French phrases are always showing up in literature. I’d love to understand them without having to look them up. But French eluded me. None of the letters are pronounced! I found myself continually confounded when trying to learn French. With language, I need to connect the written form with how it is spoken, and French made no sense to me. A thousand times I thought, if only this were like Spanish, where the rules of pronunciation are straightforward and clear.

At some point in the recent past, maybe when it was when we vacationed in Florida, I decided, I want to learn Spanish. Like for real. I had forgotten about my written-down bucket list. I was dreaming about travel to Spain and Mexico, to South America, and to speak the language that so many in the US speak.

In the past I performed lessons on apps like Duolingo and Babbel, but I disliked how there’s no clear order or true learning about how the language works, at least not that’s apparent to me.

This time I’m trying something different. I had maybe 5-6 years of Spanish instruction in high school and college, so I have familiarity with basics, I just can’t understand or speak it. Every day now, I try to do at least two things to keep me exposed and listening to Spanish, plus a tiny bit of speaking. My goals are to be able to get around in Spanish-speaking places without forcing English, and ultimately, I’d love to be able to read Spanish literature in the original Spanish. Like Como Agua Para Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.

This first thing I do every day is to interact with lessons from Language Transfer, The Thinking Method. Each lesson is a 8-13 minute recorded session between an instructor and a student building sentences together. I love the approach because the instructor teaches how to learn the language based on what you already know along with some foundational rules of Spanish. For example, -al words in English come from Latin and are the same in Spanish, just with different pronunciations, like normal. Similarly, -tion words in English often become -ción words in Spanish, and from there you can find the verb: conversation becomes conversación, which gives the verb conversar. From there you can conjugate.

The other thing I’m doing is watching videos from Dreaming Spanish. The videos are all Spanish, without English subtitles, and they range from super beginner where they speak slowly and use visual aids, to more advanced where they speak more rapidly and you have to be able to understand at at least a basic level to have any clue what’s going on. I love it because the teachers are from Spain and all over Central and South America, so you get an opportunity to hear lots of different accents. I started with videos on YouTube that were basically, “What is this thing called in your country?” I try to watch at least 15 minutes each day.

I failed miserably on a recent work trip to do my lessons every day, but I did download a lot of the Dreaming Spanish videos on the plane, including every episode of Augustina playing Flaggle. On that trip, I told my team I was trying to learn Spanish, and it quickly became clear: learning in the privacy of your quiet alone space is very different from actually speaking the language with other live humans. One of my teammates is from Mexico and his native language is obviously Spanish. I was too shy to attempt Spanish with him, even though English is his second language and he listens and speaks and writes in that every day at work. And on our work trip, when I mentioned my Spanish ambitions, a different teammate said, “Ooh! Say something in Spanish!” I froze and was like, why did I tell anyone this, I’m embarrassed, let’s talk about something else. I guess I’ve still got a long way to go.