What Jhumpa Lahiri Would Tell Your Teen About Learning Spanish Abroad

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri didn't need to learn Italian. She had no family there, no job requiring it, no practical reason at all — just a pull toward the language after a single visit to Florence in her twenties. She spent the next two decades circling that pull, until finally, in her forties, she moved her entire family to Rome simply to live inside the language she loved. Eventually, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist did something almost unthinkable: she started writing books in Italian, a language she was still learning, instead of the English she had already mastered.

Her memoir about the experience offers something surprisingly useful for a teenager standing at the edge of their own decision — whether to actually go, or to stay comfortably where the language is familiar.

The Lake Every Spanish Student Already Knows

Lahiri describes her early years of studying Italian as swimming laps along the edge of a lake — always close to the shore of English, safe, supported, never far from solid ground. It was good practice. It kept her sharp. It never truly changed her.

Sound familiar? Years of Spanish class often work the same way. Vocabulary lists, verb charts, the occasional class conversation with a teacher who already knows what you're trying to say — all useful, all safely close to shore. It builds real skill. It rarely builds the nerve to actually use it.

Lahiri's insight is simple and a little unsettling: you don't become fluent by swimming better laps along the same shore. You become fluent by leaving it — swimming out to where your first language can't reach you, where there's no one nearby to translate, no life vest if you falter. That's not a metaphor for a classroom. That's a description of a host family dinner table.

Choosing It, Not Just Studying It

What makes Lahiri's story land so personally is that no one assigned her Italian. English came from circumstance. Bengali came from her parents. Italian was the first language she ever chose entirely for herself — pursued out of pure desire, with no practical justification required.

That distinction matters for a teenager who's spent years being taught Spanish because a school schedule required it. There's a real difference between a language you're handed and a language you decide, for yourself, to actually go get. Choosing to go — packing a bag, moving in with a family who doesn't speak English, staying because you want to, not because a syllabus says you have to — is the closest thing a 16-year-old gets to Lahiri's leap. It turns Spanish from a class you're taking into a language you're claiming.

Mistakes Aren't the Failure. They're the Proof.

Lahiri never pretended fluency arrived gracefully. She's openly admitted to writing in imperfect, mistake-filled Italian — in the very same breath as declaring her love for the language. That's not a contradiction. It's the whole point. She wasn't chasing correctness. She was chasing the feeling of actually being inside the language, mistakes and all, because the mistakes were proof she'd genuinely left the shore.

That's a completely different measure of success than the one most classrooms teach. School rewards not being wrong. Real immersion rewards trying anyway — ordering the wrong thing at dinner, mixing up a verb tense mid-sentence with a host sibling, and simply continuing, because being understood matters more than being perfect. A teenager who leaves for Costa Rica willing to sound a little ridiculous for a while will out-learn a straight-A Spanish student who never risks it.

What Actually Waits on the Other Side

Lahiri has described what she found once she stopped observing Italian from the outside and started living inside it: not just new vocabulary, but a new way of seeing — a shift in who she was, opened up simply by learning to think in someone else's words. For her, language stopped being a skill added onto her identity and became a genuine second way of being a person.

That's not a small promise, and it's not one a textbook can deliver, no matter how many years a student spends in it. It requires the lake. It requires actually leaving the shore.

The Choice in Front of Your Teen

Your teen already has the vocabulary laps. Years of Spanish class have made sure of that. What immersion offers isn't more laps — it's the shore they haven't left yet. A host family who won't switch to English to make things easier. A classroom of Costa Rican teenagers who expect them to keep up, not slow down. A version of Spanish that isn't graded, isn't rehearsed, and isn't safe — and is, for exactly that reason, the only version that actually changes who they are.

Ready to help your teen leave the shore?Reach out to us — we've watched this exact leap happen, summer after summer, for 25 years.