Creating Another Self

My favorite blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates is learning French and, from time to time, he writes about it.  This morning he writes about how some things cannot be translated, that to speak French, he needs to ask, '"How would a French person express this?" or better still, "How would my particular French self express this?"'  At the end of the article, he concludes, “We are not so much learning a second language, as we are creating another self.  And that is incredibly exciting.”  My first response to that sentence was envy.  I’ll never create that other self.  Then I decided I was wrong.  I have created that other self; it just isn’t very fluent.  I've spent of lot of time in Spain with just a little Spanish.  I've bought food, found places to sleep, taken public transportation, and hiked hundreds of miles without getting permanently lost.  Even that is incredibly exciting.