Last summer, I started using Duolingo.

I had taken a trip to Germany in 2016 and met a relative who did not speak any English, my father’s octogenarian cousin Marlene. At this point in my life, I had some level of basic phrasebook German down pat, and not much more. My husband and I arrived at her home, and within a minute or two she asked me a question. I thought she asked if we would like to have dinner. I replied with a hearty “Ja!”

More words kept coming after that. I caught, at best, every 10th one. It took all of five more minutes for us to realize the only way we’d be able to communicate was through the miracle of Google Translate. Marlene was marveled by the app. Kraig and I were grateful. We were actually (sort of) able to have a conversation.

Two hours later, I came to realize the question Marlene had asked me at the beginning of the evening wasn’t “Would you like to have dinner?” but rather was “Have you already eaten dinner?” I only realized what happened when, thanks to Google Translate, she was able to ask us if we would mind if she ate some dinner - and if perhaps we’d like to enjoy some dessert while she ate.

It was at that moment I realized I needed to seriously study this language.

However, it took the fear of returning to Germany two years later to get me to actually attempt to learn German in earnest. I started with both Memrise and Duolingo, but ultimately stuck with Duolingo as my primary tool. Communicating in Germany was infinitely easier on that second post-Duolingo trip. I still made my fair share of mistakes, but I could have conversations that didn’t just come out of a phrasebook. It took work to tune my ear to really hear what was being said by others around me, but the effort certainly paid off.

German wasn’t the first language I’d worked to learn. I had six years of French in middle school and high school and two semesters of Anglo-Saxon in college. (Yes, Anglo-Saxon, the language that will allow you to do one thing in life you never knew you wanted to do: read Beowulf in the original language, featuring bonus letters that later went extinct like thorn and eth.) But rekindling my love of learning languages through Duolingo, I started brushing up my French. I dabbled in a little Spanish. And I began a solid effort to start to learn Italian. Today, I’m on a 200 day streak with the app. I don’t want to lose that streak (hello, gamification of learning), so every day I take at least 20 minutes to do a few more lessons.

Duolingo, Babel, Rosetta Stone, Instant Immersion, Memrise… these apps and services have all made it easier and easier for us to become polyglots with the spoken language - something too few of us in America really take the time to do, at least not as compared to our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world.

But being a polyglot isn’t just about speaking French or Arabic. There are plenty of other “languages” we fail to learn working in the performing arts. And like most Americans who assume that the other person will speak English, we assume that if we are in marketing, our colleagues in education will just learn to speak marketing for us. Or if we’re in finance, that our colleagues in artistic will learn to speak finance for us. Not only do we often have a hard time learning the languages of our peers, we have a hard time even meeting them halfway.

There isn’t a Duolingo for production. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to learn the language. Start off by owning your own ignorance. (After all, who would go to Brazil and pretend they could speak Portuguese and then get frustrated at the nice people of Rio for not understanding your terrible made up attempt at speaking their language?) Talking to your colleagues and let them know you’d like to learn. It might mean a site visit to a shop during a costume build. It might mean sitting in to a meeting with your finance team and the auditors just to listen. It might mean visiting an audition for your teen education program. Whatever it is you need to do to begin to learn the language, your peers will probably be delighted to know you are interested. They might even voice an interest in learning some of your language as well.

In the end, I’ll never speak perfect German like a native speaker will. However, I hope I’ll be able to speak enough to understand context, reasonably infer meaning when I’m greeted with something unfamiliar, and make it clear to a native German speaker that I’ve put in real effort to get it right. If we each could do that in talking to our peers across the aisle, things will still probably get a little bit lost in translation. But, less will. And in time we may just build the common language we need in our industry to actively listen, understand the difference between what we did and didn’t understand, and seek out the definitions we need to get better at what we do. It won’t solve every problem, but it will hopefully get us all a little closer to understanding each other.

And just ask anyone who has been to Paris and who has spoken French to compare their experience to someone who has been to Paris and just spoke English slowly and loudly in a restaurant or a museum. A little effort goes a long way.