Espresso and Expressions: Waking Up to 605 Days of Language Immersion
Diana Laboy-Rush
Director Product Management | Head of Product | Scrum Master | SaaS | Educational Technology | IoT | Emerging Technologies | Driving strategic new product revenue growth through user-centered innovation
Alright, let’s rewind to my 605-day saga of gab and grammar. Cast your mind back to August 2022: instead of my morning ritual of tuning into the weather and the traffic updates, I’m hitting the books — or more like language apps. Ditched the easy listening for some serious linguistic lifting. This new groove was my remedy for mending a bruised heart, post break-up from a long-haul romance. Swapping heartbreak for homework, you could say. With every ‘por’ and ‘pour’, I was not just learning the lingo; I was on a one-person mission to heal, one ‘como estas?’ and ‘?a va?’ at a time.
My Bilingual Beginnings
Growing up, Spanish was like that catchy background tune in the house — you know, the one you hum but don’t really know the words to? I could wing it with a mix of Spanish and English, but when it came to the real deal, pure Spanish, I was like a deer in headlights. And French? Pfft, those six years of classes were just gathering cobwebs in my brain’s attic. But hey, with visions of sipping espresso in Bordeaux and munching tapas in Madrid, I buckled down. It was time to dust off the old textbooks and turn my Spanglish and Franglais into something a little less… lost in translation.
Principal, Technical Product Management - Foundational Technology Platforms at Nike
7 个月I’m just over 880 days doing both Portuguese and Spanish!