Italiano

Having dark hair and dark skin I am often mistaken for Italian and there’s been many a time when a local has launched into conversation with me thinking I'm able to discuss the finer points of Italian life.  Until recently I’m sure my expression was more akin to startled bunny than the sophisticated woman of the world look that I try to project!  But lately my language skills have been showing unmistakeable signs of life.

As an English teacher I’m used to seeing people getting to grips with a new language and I am deeply in awe of anyone who does it.  My own endeavours with Italian have always seemed doomed to failure and often at times I feel as if I’ll never say a sentence without making some howling error – resulting in at best miscommunication and at worst outright derision.   I’m not naturally a good student and always manage to find some kind of activity to avoid head in exercise book time (I must just clean the oven, do the shopping, make a cake etc, etc.)  I’ve often felt a bit of a fraud for giving my students tips and suggestions for study that I never do myself.   At the end of a draining 12 hour day the last thing I want to do is open an Italian text book and get down to some book learning. 

When I arrived here last year many of my Italian friends had a good laugh at my attempts at the lingo so much so that I seemed to have developed a block or lack of confidence in my ability to get to grips with the language – word of advice people encouragement is not mockery.  But as I say to my students you need persistence and an understanding that it’s ok to make mistakes.  I have suffered for my language attempts – yes I have been watching Italian television, yes it’s pretty bad and I am a little embarrassed to say that I got a bit hooked on masterchef Italia but for the most part it’s the history channel that’s been my language immersion vehicle. 

Slowly from the soup of noise words, then phrases and finally sentences began to emerge.  I have begun to notice that I longer look at encounters with officialdom with trepidation; exchanges at the supermarket have become more conversational.  A few weeks after Christmas on a night out with friends we bumped into an Italian friend who speaks near perfect English (and when I say near perfect I really mean it, not only is he grammatically acurate, but has a shockingly perfect accent and can use colloquial English correctly.)  That night for the first time and I’m not sure why we spoke in Italian and yes I made many mistakes but my meaning was clear.  The next day J beamed and said my language skills had come a long way in the six months she’s known me.

Last week and after a story too long to go into I ended up at a birthday party where not a soul spoke English – in situations such as these my only tip is get in there and speak to as many people as you can.  For the first time I noticed that not only was I speaking Italian without much difficulty but I wasn’t thinking in English and then translating into Italian!  That’s the mythical step I tell my students about!  When an English speaker did turn up we still spoke in Italian.  This guy was a passionate traveller like myself and we talked about places we had both been to and places we’d love to visit – so beyond the where are you from, what are you doing talk that I was convinced my Italian was stuck at.

After an evening of Italian with not a word of English I had the pleasant confirmation that indeed my Italian has “got somewhere.”  While I’m nowhere near discussing the metaphysical significance of Murakami’s parallel worlds I can now at least hold a conversation.  There are those with whom I’ll always speak English – once you start in one language you seem to continue but let’s hope I continue to make progress.