I grew up bilingual. This means that among the roughly 7,159 languages in the world, I have mastered two.

Though I spent most of my childhood in Greece, my parents and I moved frequently between there and the United Kingdom throughout middle and high school. As a result, my brain learned to live in the in-between, adopting a convoluted mix of English and Greek.

While my class notes and diary entries were written in one language, the notes on our fridge were in another. I told jokes to my friends in half-translations; I paused mid-sentence to explain English slang phrases to my mom. Eventually, I even started dreaming in both English and Greek.

But I won’t pretend I was ever good at learning languages.

By the time I turned 16, English had settled so deeply into my daily life that every new language I tried to learn never quite stuck. The task of adding a third language to my repertoire seemed daunting.

My dad always worried that if we weren’t careful, English — let alone a third language — would crowd Greek out entirely. At home, he insisted we speak “only Greek,” afraid that losing the language would mean losing something much greater: culture, memory, belonging. So, even as I learned to move fluently between the two, Greek was always treated as my first world.

I was determined that connection, then, was contingent on this lingual similarity. If I were to get truly close with someone, I thought, it can only be if they dream in a language I can understand.

“Does that mean you’d only ever want to marry someone who speaks Greek?” a friend asked me once. Well, I figured, yes. How else are they supposed to understand, “S’agapó” (“I love you”)? 

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

When I came to college, connection began to flourish through translation: I met classmates who shared music in Portuguese, taught me introductory words in Russian and explained the weight of cultural phrases in Tamil. Even my old high school debate coach would slip in a Hebrew word or two mid-conversation — mid-exclamation, rather — when English wasn’t enough.

Soon enough, I realized that insisting on having the same first language as a condition for true connection was irrational.

That’s when I knew I had to change my attitude about languages. Besides, it only seemed fair: I had to meet people halfway to prove I truly wanted to know them.

So began my new language learning journey. And Duolingo — no, this is not an ad — became my best friend.

Little by little, I tried my best to pick up the tiniest phrases in languages my friends spoke by asking them to teach me. More often than not, it was a language I could never fully grasp — but one I knew was the doorway to a friend’s entire world.

In turn, my friends started learning phrases in Greek. They even learned how to place the emphasis in my name on the correct syllable. In Greek, it’s “Alexía,” I said, not Aléxia.

Love doesn’t come from similarity at all. It comes from welcoming difference. And while it is terrifying to realize there is an entire world living inside the mind of someone you love — one you may never fully access — it is always worth trying to get in.

Learning a language is an act of devotion. In fact, learning a language may be the most heartfelt love language of all. It takes time, curiosity, intentionality, persistence — all acts necessary to facilitate true affection between people. It goes beyond wanting to simply know someone and seeps into truly trying to understand them.

Well, now, I understand. With the roughly 7,159 languages in the world, there are just as many ways to know someone.

And if that’s true, there is no way I am stopping at just two.

Alexia Sextou is a Medill sophomore and author of “Margin Notes.” She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.

Related Stories:

— Margin Notes: Kids are mean. Well, so are college students.

— Margin Notes: I’m afraid I’ve been afraid too long

— Margin Notes: I don’t have an internship and other world-ending problems