I’ve decided to try to learn to speak Italian so that I can fail to meaningfully communicate with my wife in two languages. Seriously, I’m trying to learn Italian because I admire people who are multi-lingual and I want to be able to talk to people when I visit Sandra in Florence but mostly, I want to learn Italian because I’m not all that great with English and I need all the help I can get.
I bought one of these computer based language programs from a kiosk at the airport in Dallas. You may wonder why I chose to buy Italian lessons from an airport in Texas; unless you’ve ever been to an airport in Texas then, like me, you’ve probably never understood anything Texans say either. For all we know, they could be speaking Italian.
Learning a second language when you’re in your mid-50s can be problematic because, unless you’re an English teacher or a complete nerd (not necessarily the same) by this time you’ve forgotten anything you might ever have know about grammar, syntax and, for the love of God, what is a participle and why do I care?
I started working on my Italian everyday with great enthusiasm and after two weeks I can confidently say many useful phrases. While vacationing in Florence I will be able to say, “the yellow bicycle” and “the little girl is not driving” should that ever come up in conversation.
I have to admit that I’m not practicing for two hours a day anymore like I did when I first started. It turns out that this is a little harder than the guy at the airport kiosk said it would be.
When you haven’t used the part of your brain that you use for learning to how to talk for over half a century, sometimes you need to stretch and limber up a bit before conjugate a verb or you’re likely to pull some kind of cerebral hammy or something.
For the life of me I cannot understand why the Italians feel the need to make some words masculine and others feminine, which changes every other word in the freakin’ sentence! God forbid you use a masculine adjective to modify a feminine pronoun; day would be night, dogs would date cats, Newt would make sense and there would be madness and chaos!
I can think of at least seven different words that means “the” depending upon if the man, the woman, the men, the women, the boy, the girl, or the children who are reading the green book or riding the yellow bike; which according to this program they do a lot in Italy.
Why is that? After a couple of weeks of trying to understand how Italians communicate it’s clear to me that the Romans conquered the world while they still spoke Latin, but I’m convinced that they were trying to communicate in Italian when the Barbarians overran them centuries later.
Have they won a war since switching to Italian? How do you decisively command an army when there are 17 different ways to say, “Attack!” but apparently only one phrase for “Run away!”
In fairness I know it can’t be easy to learn English as a second language. I mean (that is to say I intend to express, not I am aggressive) to say that you could read this, which is spelled the same in the present and past tense; read can rhyme with reed or red or you could write with your right hand, unless you’re a south-paw and then that wouldn’t be right!
How does anyone ever learn English? It’s no wonder so few of us do it well. I have a whole new respect for foreigners struggling to ask directions to the airport. They probably just want to find the swindler who sold them their English program so they can choke him because nobody here ever says, “the bike is yellow” either!
I am determined that I will learn to speak some Italian before I visit Sandra in Italy. She’s learning a lot faster than I am because she has to order her food in Italian and, about the second time the waiter serves you a green book for dinner, you get pretty motivated to study your Italian.
So arrivederci…unless you’re a woman…no wait…oh never mind; until next week!
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