This article presents the author's response to Alastair Pennycook and Azirah Hashim. In this article, the author contends that learning a foreign language should not lock learners in an imagined homogeneous target culture, despite the efforts of textbooks to reinforce stereotypes and some learners' desire to identify with an essentialised Other. On the contrary, the foreign language should be an opportunity to discover a new way of being "German", "French", "Italian" or "American". The author has previously called this new way a "third place". It is a place that has to be conquered day by day against the levelling forces of nationalist demagogy, marketing stereotypes, and the dream of a unitary, global language. Pennycook's notion of translingual activism is a very good, dynamic way of expressing this third place.