Why I’m Embracing Learning New Languages in a World Obsessed with English

Conquering foreign language anxiety

The author in the Austrian Tyrol, 1988. All photos by Michelle Lawson.

I used to think of multilingual people as other people. The first time I travelled abroad alone, I was 22, on an Interrail trip across Europe. I left the train in Innsbruck, Austria and popped into a supermarket en route to the hostel, confident that the German I’d learned at…