“Life is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re going to get.”

When I was a little boy in Soviet Russia, I thought speaking a foreign language was a beautiful but largely useless skill. English didn’t even make it into my top twenty-five school subjects, and my grades faithfully reflected that lack of interest.

Little did I know that, at the age of twenty, I would board a plane, land in the Bay Area, and slowly watch English become my main language. It became the language I use to talk to my neighbors, my patients, my teachers, my students, and eventually even my children.

I have always learned languages out of necessity, and French was actually the first one I seriously attempted after English. The reason was simple: my wife refused to go to Paris for our honeymoon unless I learned enough French to get by. I was, and still am, a francophile. I had always wanted to go to France, especially Paris, so this was non-negotiable.

I learned diligently. For six months, I listened to French in Your Car during my commute until I had memorized the tapes almost verbatim. This is not the best way to learn a language, but in 1999 my options were limited. There was no Google, let alone the endless language apps and online schools we have now.

We stayed in a cheap hotel on Boulevard du Montparnasse. When we opened the window, Parisian air, scented with coffee and fresh bread, flooded the room.

We quickly grew tired of restaurant food and decided we wanted to eat what Parisians actually ate. That meant we needed to find where they bought their food.

After a couple of failed attempts to get the attention of busy-looking men, I approached a middle-aged woman. If you are going to misjudge someone’s age, it is always better to underestimate.

“S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle, où est le supermarché?”

She answered, and I understood her. All of it. The turns, the distances, the landmarks.

The supermarket exceeded all expectations. We ate like locals: pâté, cheese, baguette, wine, and even éclairs with coffee. I briefly considered asking for gastronomic refugee status, but there was no police around.

My second episode was related to Latin.

We were passing through Venice, a family of four: my wife and I with our two kids, a twelve-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. We arrived in the morning and were supposed to leave that night on an overnight train to Paris.

We spent the day wandering through narrow cobblestone streets, past small cafés, pizzerias, and charming little shops. At some point, right when it was time to head to the train station, we realized we were lost.

Venice is an old city with its own system of directional signs pointing toward major landmarks. I knew the Italian word for train station, or at least I thought I did. But there were no arrows pointing to anything recognizable.

One arrow read Per Rialto, toward the famous Rialto Bridge. Another said Per S. Marco, toward Saint Mark’s Square. And the last one was cryptic: Alla Ferrovia.

Sometimes memory works in strange ways. It offers flashes of seemingly unrelated scenes that suddenly bring everything into focus. In this case, it was an introductory lecture on Latin.

Our professor once said that while most people think Latin is a dead language, it is actually everywhere. You step onto a train platform. You arrive by autobus. You see a policeman. You ride a velosiped. All Latin. We are surrounded by Lingua Latina.

I looked again at the signs, silently thanked my professor, and confidently led my family toward Alla Ferrovia, the Iron Road, the railway station.

The name Italia is often said to mean “the land of calves.” There are no witnesses left to explain exactly why the Italians chose it, but I like to imagine Greek colonists arriving in the then New World, discovering fertile Apennine slopes, settling down to raise cattle and, since they clearly had time, developing a new cuisine.

Italy’s rich history, mythology, and culinary traditions had always drawn me in. I wanted to experience it firsthand: walk the Appian Way in Rome, the mother of all roads where six thousand followers of Spartacus were once crucified, see the Colosseum, and finally try pasta, pizza, and risotto. After all, honeyed mice and pheasant tongues are unlikely to appear on modern menus.

Naturally, I decided to learn a little Italian to make communication easier. Unfortunately, the course I chose focused heavily on shopping. So my vocabulary expanded to include camicia, pantaloni, maglioni, shirts, pants, sweaters.

There are two reasons an American tourist goes shopping for clothes in Italy: you’re either very brave or very rich. I was neither, so I listened to those lessons without much enthusiasm until we arrived in Rome. Rome introduced me to a third category: bad luck.

An airline company, which I will not name but which is known for double-booking flights and removing passengers it deems “nonessential”, managed to lose all of our luggage.

A family of four, traveling through a foreign country during spring break, suddenly needs many things, including items rarely covered in tourist language courses: tampons, hairbrushes, shaving razors, and underwear.

Fortunately, I knew exactly how to proceed.

“Buongiorno, signorina.” You always want to greet the person helping you, and it never hurts to compliment their youthfulness.

“Io vorrei questo, per favore,” followed by a decisive point at the item you need.

They might ask, “Di che colore?”

“Rosa, per favore.”

And just like that, your child ends up with a much desired red hairbrush, which, at that point, feels like a victory.

My German experience was more limited. Most people spoke excellent English, which made my heroic linguistic efforts largely unnecessary.

Restaurant staff, however, were consistently delighted by my latest hit phrase: “Ich möchen zahlen, bitte.”

It was supposed to be “Ich möchte zahlen, bitte”, I would like to pay. I managed one small but meaningful mistake in verb-pronoun agreement, the kind that feels painfully familiar if your grammatical instincts were shaped by Russian rather than English.

Still, the intention was clear, the bill always arrived, and the smiles were genuine, which, by then, had become my working definition of success.

My connection to the Spanish language was accidental from the very beginning. I picked it up at work, mostly by listening to simultaneous translation during provider-patient conversations. Naturally, the vocabulary was less touristy and more medically oriented.

I can quickly ask: ¿Tienes dolor? ¿Calentura? ¿Tos? ¿Alergia?

No one ever suspects that I understand what people are discussing in Spanish around me, whether it’s patients or a bus driver in Cancún explaining to a tour guide that the weather is turning stormy and the tourists need to be taken back early.

If I had to recommend just one Spanish phrase to learn, it would be: “Mucho trabajo, poco dinero, amigo.”

It works particularly well when someone is trying to sell you a timeshare in Puerto Vallarta. If you say it with a smile, they smile back and, importantly, stop wasting their time trying to lure money you have already admitted you don’t have.

Some people might find deeper purpose in the fact that I was assigned English rather than German or French in middle school and later ended up living in the United States. I tend to see it differently. To me, it feels more like the randomness of the universe at work.

Life, after all, is like a box of chocolates: you never really know which skills will become useful, which language will suddenly be needed, or when a half-forgotten phrase will turn into a small victory. But it never hurts to maintain a healthy curiosity.