Language learning is hard. I mean really hard. The kind of hard that makes adults who have accomplished major things in their lives want to give up. Staying focused in another language is exhausting. It’s mentally draining in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. It would be so easy to check out during a lesson. Instead, you’re trying to follow what’s being said, process it, figure out how to respond, and then say something back — all in the moment, all while t

Week one of my Spanish class in Málaga felt hard but manageable. I understood my teacher. I recognized the vocabulary. I was learning. I belonged in B1. But in week two they moved me up to B2. And everything unraveled. One day we were assigned a worksheet on the subjunctive, and I stared at it with no idea where to begin. The teacher had a thicker Spanish accent, switched to vosotros (a form I had almost never used), and introduced vocabulary I couldn’t even look up because m