Do It For The Sugar Maple

Easy as can be, perfect apartment dweller

Might take some convincing

Basically a coin flip

It will be an uphill battle but I might be able to, while saying goodbye to my deposit

No increased rent, deposit or argument could convince any landlord to let us in

You should be able to work together to solve unexpected problems like fixing a flat tire or getting lost in an unfamiliar station

You should feel comfortable and safe enough around this person that you can sit in comfortable silence

You should be able to keep each other interested and deal with each others boredom in a healthy way

As someone who grew up bilingual and has spent years watching fiction handle this with the grace of a person trying to parallel park a cruise ship: please. i am asking nicely. stop phonetically spelling out accents in dialogue. stop having your multilingual character "think in english." and stop treating languages as cute flavour when they're actually load-bearing walls. let me explain:

⊹ Phonetic accent spelling-- "ze said zis," "I canna doo eet," "ees very 'ot"--does not convey an accent. it conveys that you find the accent hard to read and mildly comedic. actual accents are not misspellings. they are specific music, rhythm, stress patterns, vowel shapes that cannot be represented in text that way. what conveys accent is word order, idiom, the things a speaker reaches for. A character who says "it doesn't matter, leave it" and a character who says "never mind, let it go" are from different places. use that. not the apostrophes.

⊹ Multilingual people do not experience their languages as separate filing cabinets they access one at a time. languages blur and overlap and interfere with each other in beautiful ways. When you're tired you reach for the word from the other language because it's closer. when you're emotional you revert to your first language because it's where your feelings actually live. when you're angry you swear in the language you learned swearing in. when you're tender you use the diminutives and endearments that don't translate. your bilingual character's language choice in every scene is characterisation. use it as such.

⊹ the thing about not having a word for something is real and it matters. Every language has concepts the others can't carry cleanly. the grief for something you never had. the specific quality of afternoon light. the feeling of wanting to be home while you're already there. when your character encounters something their language doesn't have a word for, they don't just find a workaround, they feel the gap. they feel slightly untranslatable. multilingual people live with the knowledge that some part of who they are exists only in one language and cannot be fully brought across.

My aunts and uncles didnt want to learn it, I dont talk to my mother, and my sister has basically all forgotten it. My grandparents have long passed and it seems like the only way I remember the language is by watching YouTube videos of people talking.

"we get it!! robby's sad!!!" do you, though? do you get it? do you understand that this show is showing burnout through the lens of Robby? that we see Robby so much and we see his entire deterioration because we are seeing what burnout and PTSD and depression and suicidality look like in healthcare workers? do you understand that that's important to see?

do you understand that it's touching so many people with the same issues who don't even work in healthcare? do you understand how gritty and raw and realistic this portrayal is? do you understand how much that means to people, after seeing mental health softened or romanticized in almost every piece of media? do you get it?