My parents paid for me to study Chinese when I was a child. We are Nigerians. That should tell you a bit about the mindset that they have and how I was raised. The language class was accessible, somewhat convenient, and connected to the school. Sweet, but what would have been even more convenient and accessible would have been to teach us their native languages, which they already know, and simply talk to us children. This tells us even more. They sometimes overlook the simplest solution and inadvertently make things harder than they should be. This is a trait that I have unfortunately taken on.

I have since felt very particular about language. I grew up learning Spanish in the first elementary school I attended and won 1st place in the school's Vocabulary Bee when I was in 3rd grade, challenging every 3rd-5th grade student who partook in the language program. I can barely string together a sentence in Spanish now.

I tried to reconcile losing the language after leaving the school by attempting to study on my own, using apps, and in the early years re-reading my old classwork, but the damage was done. I had no one to talk to, so there was no one to share the language with and no one to help me remember.

I tried to learn the languages of my people but those attempts were even worse. Like with Spanish, there was no one for me to talk to. My siblings did not share the interest at the same time I did, and my parents were uninterested in teaching us and seldom spoke to us. The materials were even less accessible as indigenous languages are less documented. As an adolescent with no money to pay for materials this was a death sentence. Curiosity can only last so long when there's nothing to engage it.

I guess the particularities about language came back to me in my love of literature.