On becoming able to speak

And suddenly the world opens up to me. For years I couldn't read it — I found the letters beautiful, precisely because they were so foreign, so illegible, but without understanding any of it. My curiosity grew: I wanted to know what I was actually looking at. After school, a friend and I drove a black, partly rusted but still road-worthy VW bus to Morocco. For the first time, I was somewhere I could only observe life happening around me, could try to make sense of it, and still catch only fragments. That was the moment I decided to study Arabic.

For seven years, the Arabic language and the Middle East were what I spent my time on. I studied in Bern, Damascus and Leipzig, and got to know people, their visions, their hopes. In the first weeks of studying in Bern, exactly what I had hoped for happened: I became able to speak. Letter by letter, I learned to read, write and understand Arabic. Strings of characters became words, words became sentences, sentences became texts — and those texts opened themselves to me like a chest of drawers you'd stopped expecting to find anything in.

I flipped through photos from the Morocco trip and read words that, until recently, had been nothing more than ornamental marks on walls. I understood what they meant and began to see them differently. The curved letters had fascinated me from the start — I had photographed countless pieces of street writing that struck me as beautiful, many of which turned out, in hindsight, to be simple advertisements for laundry detergent.

Learning to write and read, I had unlocked a new world. And I watch the same thing happening with my children now: the slow scanning with the eyes, the concentrated movement from letter to letter, saying each one out loud, looking up at me, going back, repeating, assembling sounds into syllables, starting over, and then looking up with bright eyes to announce the word at full volume: "Bread!"

That small moment of illumination — when the rigid focus on looking dissolves and something new opens up. When we find expressions for our impressions. When we have words to name what has always been around us, but which we only now actually see and understand. Or taste.

My first specialty coffee unsettled me. It smelled and tasted unfamiliar, almost nothing like what I had understood "coffee" to be. "What exactly is this?" I asked. The answer was: "Coffee." But if coffee could taste like this, what had I been drinking all those years? I searched for words to describe what I was smelling, tasting, feeling — my existing vocabulary didn't reach far enough. I read how others put coffee into language. My coffee vocabulary grew: I talked about aromas, textures, types of acidity, and built mental profiles for coffees that had stayed with me.

Since I had to learn a second language alongside Arabic in my studies, I chose Persian — Farsi. My professor said early on that we don't actually learn languages, we only imitate others. That was the key for me. From then on, I listened even more closely when baristas, roasters or just coffee drinkers talked about flavour. I made a habit of taking something from everyone — picking out words I understood that described precisely what I myself felt. Different registers developed in my language. Depending on who I was talking to, I'd reach for the right one: with producers, who mostly can't drink the coffee they grow because they sell it, I speak more emotionally and less technically. In cuppings with the roasting team, we dissect coffees with surgical precision and adjust the roast profile based on our verdict to bring out exactly what we're after. I describe the same coffee to my mother in entirely different terms than to a fellow roaster.

The larger our vocabulary, the more freely we can use it, play with it, build pictures that existed only inside us before. Anything we eat, drink or feel can be a moment of learning. We just have to decide, consciously, that it is.