Brittany Luce

And everybody's talking in Mandarin except for me, my sister, and my mom, my white mom.

Love her.

But my family's just translating for us and, like, accommodating us in English.

And I think it stunk.

It stunk that I couldn't connect with my family in their own terms.

And I want to learn for that reason.

I want to connect with them and I want to be able to communicate to my father because Mandarin was his first language.

And even though he's forgotten a lot of it, it's still a language that I think gives him a lot of comfort.

Well, as we said, learning a second language is a hobby that asks a lot of you, not just time and sometimes money, but also like pride.

You know, when you're first starting off, you sound so bad and make mistakes often.

It is very humbling.

It's actually humiliating.

Yes, yes.

And it's so much easier to rely on other people speaking English.

And I think it's easier to rely on technology.

Yeah.

You know, on my phone, there are apps that translate English to Mandarin for me.

They allow me to scan a menu and read what it says just by hovering my phone over it so I never have to learn the characters.

Captions in movies that I can put on and AirPods, they offer live translation.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen that.