I first encountered Spanish when I was in fifth grade. I remember it vividly. I had just moved to a new school, and all of my classmates had started Spanish classes in kindergarten, so they were way ahead of me. At the start of my first class, my teacher walked in and began speaking Spanish, and I slouched down in my seat in the hopes that she wouldn’t notice that I was there. She did. She walked over to me and smiled gently when she saw the look of terror on my face. “You’ve never taken Spanish before, have you?” she asked. All I could do was shake my head no. 

Throughout the course of that year, my teacher was a constant source of encouragement. She would pull me aside in class and help me with my vocabulary, she stayed after school to help me practice sentence structure and writing skills, and she set me up with an online language software so I could practice speaking the language. These lessons were all very helpful and appreciated, but the best thing that she ever did was start speaking only in Spanish for the second half of the school year. By the end of the year, I was able to read whole stories that I hadn’t been able to understand at all in September. This was the first time that I had ever been exposed to another language, and the first time that I had really stopped to consider what life outside of the United States might be like. This experience opened a whole new door for me. It gave me a sense of confidence in myself, it made me realize that I loved learning about languages and cultures, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of traveling in the future. Something just “clicked” for me that year. It felt natural to speak a new language, and I knew then that I had to continue with it.