Learning a language makes you a beginner in public. That’s exactly why it builds you.

Other skills let you be bad in private for a while. A language does not: the practice happens in front of people, in real time, with your mistakes audible. That is uncomfortable and it is also the reason it changes you, because you get repeated proof that being visibly imperfect is survivable and that people are mostly kind about it.

Put yourself in one conversation this week where you will definitely get something wrong. Count it a success if you were understood, not if you were correct. The nerve you build there transfers to every other place where you are the newest person in the room.