If your grandparents speak a language you don’t, learn ten words of it. Then watch their face.

Ten words will not get you a conversation, and that is not what they are for. They say that a life which happened before you exists for you, that you were interested enough to carry something back across. For somebody who has spent years being spoken to in a borrowed language, hearing their own come out of a grandchild lands somewhere translation never reaches.

Ask whoever in the family still speaks it for ten useful ones: hello, thank you, I love you, are you hungry. Write them down the way they sound. Use them this week rather than practising until they are perfect.