Lana Alison

So You Wanna Learn a Language?

Growing up in America, I spoke English at home my whole life. It's pretty normal in American culture to only know one language—English, even if your family speaks more than one. I often begged my mother to teach me her native language of Tagalog but I never ended up learning it. It felt odd to me that I only spoke one language and my cousins halfway across the world all spoke at least three. But then one day my world changed.