Just because Selena's family has some hispanic roots, doesn't necessarily mean Selena can fluently speak Spanish. She tells Latin Magazine she wants to learn to speak Spanish better so she doesn't embarrass herself if she messes up.
"I really want to get Rosetta Stone, because I really need to learn my language," the 18-year-old dished to Latina.com while she was in New York City promoting her new film Ramona & Beezus. Gomez—who is Italian on her mother's side and Mexican on her father's side—loves her fellow Latinos, but admits she occasionally experiences trepidation at Latin awards shows because she’s not entirely confident in her language skills.
"I practice [Spanish], but I can understand it better than I can speak it,” explains Selena. “So in a lot of my interviews that I did recently, they would speak to me in Spanish and I would answer back in English. They were like, 'You pick it up so easily,' but I don’t want to say it in Spanish because I’d be embarrassed if I mess something up.
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Like Jessica Alba, and other A-list Latinas before her, Gomez says she doesn’t think you have to speak Spanish fluently to be a "real" Latina. "At first I did," she admits, "but then I started to see all these people that accepted me regardless of the fact that I didn’t speak it."