Hello!
Or should I say … Nei5 hou2 ( 你好)? I’m learning Cantonese and I'm guessing that you might be learning a heritage language, too. I was hoping that we might be able to help one another out.
A little about me: I’m Kat, and I’m a journalist and writer. You may remember me from such podcasts as Code Switch or Pop Culture Happy Hour or The Waves. My first book, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, was published a few years ago. My Cantonese is … very bad, as my dad might say—more in future newsletters about that.
I wrote an article for The Atlantic last fall about parents who are trying to teach their children a heritage language that they barely speak. This article was thorny and took me, I’m embarrassed to say, more than a year almost two years to research, report and write. It pinched at my most tender spots: my struggle with infertility and my shifting views toward motherhood, and also my inability to speak my family’s language and the inadequacy that provokes. I was heartened by the response to that article and decided to commit—like, commit-commit—to learning Cantonese. I’ll be spending the summer in Hong Kong where I’m hopeful that I’ll feel a little more comfortable opening my mouth and letting Cantonese words fall out.
But I’m burying the lede. I’m also working on a larger reported nonfiction project. (Why am I being coy? It’s a … book.) I’ve interviewed so many thoughtful and smart people who are trying to reconnect with their cultures and hidden parts of themselves through learning languages like Ukrainian, Chamoru, Arabic, Korean, Spanish, Farsi, and so on. I’ve loved delving into these stories. There’s so much family history and so many different motivations for wanting to learn those languages, and I find myself constantly gobsmacked by their efforts. Some of those people reached out through this call-out thingy that I published, which is still open in case you’re inclined to share your story. I’ve read countless research papers and am consuming podcasts, documentaries, poems, essays and novels related to learning these languages that mean so much to us, and I want to share some of what fascinates and intrigues me.
This newsletter will have:
Weekly accountability updates: What am I hoping to work on, and what are you hoping to work on?
Dispatches from yours truly
Interviews with linguists, language instructors and students
Essays, articles, podcast episodes, documentaries, YouTube channels, and so on, that I stumble upon and love and want to share with somebody (You! You can be that somebody!)
A community of people who are also learning their heritage languages and want to keep talking
Resources for learning languages
And more. I’m trying to keep this relatively low-key so I don’t psyche myself out, but my goal is for this newsletter to become a resource for us all—an organism that can shift and grow as our own relationships to our languages do, too
And to kick this off: What language are you trying to learn, and why? And what would be most helpful to keep you accountable to learning this language? Share in the comments.
xx-
Kat
P.S. Know of someone who is learning a family or heritage language and might want some accountability? Or might just be interested in reading ~language things~? Send ‘em this newsletter!