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.  

All in the Hands

There doesn’t seem to be such a thing as a quick trip to the post office here.  After many a fruitless and frustrating hour spent waiting to buy a stamp or pay a bill I have learnt to get my ticket, judge how long the wait is going to be and head off to do something productive like grocery shopping, housework or even give a lesson.   A few days ago I returned to the post office to find my timing almost perfect, one woman at the counter and one man in front of me.  After 20 minutes when the woman was still at the counter my comrade in waiting and I both simultaneously raised our hands in frustration and I realised, not without a little alarm that I am beginning to talk the Italian language of hands.

It’s a well worn cliché that Italians communicate almost as much with their hands as their words and coming from an Anglo Saxon culture that does not gesticulate much here at times it seems as if the locals are comically animated.  Watching Italians talk to each other using a seemingly endless array of hand gestures one could conclude that communication is at least 25% physical (perhaps more.)  Often it’s as if the hands have a life of their own so lively are Italian conversations.  All languages have their gestures from the hello hand wave, the thumbs up, Ok, fancy a drink, the search me shoulder shrug with palms raised upwards and of course the good old the two/one fingered salute.  The Italians have all of these but there is also a world of others that add intensity to what is being said, express frustration, or leave your audience in doubt that you think they are talking rubbish.  I wonder if Italians find telephone communication frustrating as so much of their language is physical.  Observe an Italian on the phone and it sometimes seems as if the gestures become more animated with body movements brought into being – almost as if they are trying to make the person on the other end see it – I bet they can’t wait for holographic phones!  Of course it’s on the road that the language of hand signals comes into its own.  I’ve not driven here but have spent a lot of time on the road with J, driving to lessons or on Sunday adventures and from my passenger side perspective I’ve watched drivers express annoyance at a slow set of traffic lights, their anger at fellow drivers for a real or perceived mistake.  Even J, after five years in Italy speaks in hands.  

As with all languages these signs have a subtly all of their own and it is hard for a foreigner to pick up on.  Use the wrong gesture and you may cause offense.  Because of this and partly because I’m English and we don’t do that kind of thing I have thought it best to leave the whole talking with the hands act alone.  But lately I have come to noticed that I have started to use my hands a lot more in conversation.  It started subtly with the odd palm raised fingers and thumb held together whenever I asked but why? Or WTF? And then it just grew to the point where now I feel I’m gesticulating wildly.  I hardly do it by Italian standards but it still feels weird yet strangely satisfying.  I’m a bit of a bowerbird when it comes to language and seem to talk on characteristics and phrases from wherever I am so I fear that this gesturing is now part of me.  I worry about a return to an Anglo culture and looking like a complete idiot so if I am talking to you one day and make use of a bizarre hand signal I ask you to be understanding.

Crash, Bang, Wallop

This week I’ve been asking myself do different nations hear differently?   No I haven’t been listening to the Italian charts (although whenever I am unfortunate enough to catch the latest top ten hit I do wonder if a large percentage of the Italian population is tone deaf – but I also I wonder that whenever I’m confronted with the fact that Coldplay have a career.)  When travelling through various countries one of my personal joys has always been the different languages I have encountered and the little tricks I’ve gathered to cope – whilst navigating the Japanese transport system I quickly learnt to match the symbols on my ticket to the departures board with not a single mishap, when in a little town in the Tamil speaking part of India meeting a local who spoke no English and me only speaking Panjabi, of the multitude of Indian languages, we found that we could communicate in Italian of all languages.  As well as dealing with the new words and grammatical constructions there is the host of vocal and onomatopoeic sounds that make up a language.  While I expected words to be different I never really gave a thought to the onomatopoeia. 

In the UK and Aus (I hasten to add other English speaking Countries) the onomatopoeic word for a dog bark is woof, here dogs don’t woof woof they bau bau! Birds don’t go cheep cheep they cip cip and frogs don’t ribbit they cra cra.  It’s not just the world of animal sounds that are different, if an English speaker cuts their finger they will exclaim ouch or ow an Italian will say ahi or ahia as they apply pressure to the injured digit.  Crack a joke to a native English speaker and you will hopefully hear  ha ha or hee hee try to be funny in Italy ah, ah, eh, eh, ih, ih, or uh, uh is what your ego will be wanting to hear. Tuck into a Raji curry and yum yum or om nom nom is what I want to hear from an English speaker and gnam gnam from my Italian friends.  When it comes to bodily functions once again we are in a linguistically different world, an English speaker will fart or burp and an Italian will prot and rutt respectively.  Hearing brrrring will have me leaping for the phone and Italian will only do so if he hears a drin drin.  I knock on a door while my Italian chums toc.  In Australia my floorboards would creek here they cric crac.

These onomatopoeic sounds seem so hard wired and often come from instant emotions that I cannot believe that I would ever be able to make them part of my lexical repertoire.  Yet when I talk to my long term expect friends I’m amazed that they do make the Italian exclamation when in pain, or just generally pissed off while driving.       

These differences while unimportant do make me wonder, do we hear sounds differently or is it just out different languages that result in the divergent interpretations?  The Japanese language has no L sound and Japanese speakers have great difficulty in identifying and pronouncing when speaking English.  Studies have shown that as newborns Japanese children can hear the L sound but as they grow and the brain develops to acquire language skills they lose the ability to identify the sound due to not hearing it spoken.  Does this explain why different nations interpret the same sound differently?  One theory of linguistic development argues that language developed from early humans making onomatopoeic words from the sounds around them.  I’m way to ignorant to speculate on such things but this week once again I have been reminded what an amazingly rich, complex and beautiful beast language is.