Learning another language is like getting a key to rooms you didn’t know were in the house.

A language is not just a second set of words for things you already think. It carries a different way of cutting up the world, and learning it gives you access to people, jokes and ideas that were simply out of reach before. Some of the rooms it opens are inside your own head.

Start smaller than feels serious, ten minutes a day with something you actually enjoy. Aim at understanding before you aim at speaking well. Use it badly with a real person as early as you can stand, because that is where it stops being a school subject.