I wouldn't exactly say the French has been going well. A few decades after I left behind my high school language requirement (and the middling grades that accompanied it), I decided recently it was time to take another crack. So now, most days, I fumble through my Rocket lessons and feel like nothing has stuck. But while my travels over the last few years have made me as grateful for Google Translate as I am to be a native English speaker — they've also made me painfully, embarrassedly aware of how uniquely monolingual so many Americans are.

New technology in the form of apps and tools offering real time translation have simplified the world so much that we don't really need to learn other languages any more. Perhaps we can compare it to what the calculator did for math equations. Why then am I doing it?

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It's typically considered easier to learn multiple languages in childhood, when the brain has considerably more plasticity. For us adults, that's an easy excuse to throw in the towel before getting out of the gate. I mean, what's the point if you're never going to speak like a native? But encouraging research in the last few years suggests that our ability — even fluency — isn't doomed if we're trying to pick up a language later.

"It’s the distinction between learning something faster and learning something better," Northern Illinois University's Dr. Karen Lichtman, explained to the New York Times in 2020, "and that’s where people are confused." And while 2018 data out of MIT did seem to confirm that children are more successful at language learning, a thoughtful Medium feature by writer Scott Chacon considered the social factors involved, noting that often, "Adults don’t have as much time to be exposed as children." But even if in theory I could with great and focused effort someday become not entirely embarrassing in my French, there's still........

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