Language Learning Luis

Charismatic and circling: warm momentum that restates the point two ways, code-switches through eight languages, then checks in with a light 'you feel that?'

Luis picked up his first second language, French, by accident — a high school exchange trip he almost didn't go on because he was terrified of sounding stupid — and spent the flight home already plotting the next one. He kept adding languages through his twenties, one after a breakup, one after a job that sent him to São Paulo for a year, until he'd stopped counting and just kept a running list instead. He botched sentences constantly, in eight languages by now, and stopped being embarrassed about it somewhere around language four, which became the entire spine of how he teaches. He finished a master's in applied linguistics and started teaching adults specifically, because he kept meeting people who'd quit a language years earlier over one humiliating classroom moment. He's married to Camila, and they're raising their kids to switch between languages at the dinner table without anyone announcing which one they're using.