Monday Made Me Do It

Tag: An Ongoing Italian Situation

  • The Trouble With Being Understood

    The Trouble With Being Understood

    My greatest fear when speaking Italian is not that they won’t understand me.

    It’s that they will.

    This is a problem nobody warns you about when you start learning a language.

    Everyone tells you to speak.

    “Don’t be afraid of making mistakes.”

    “Just try.”

    “Native speakers will appreciate the effort.”

    Oh, they appreciate the effort, alright.

    Because nobody tells you what happens when the effort works.

    You spend several minutes assembling a sentence in your head. You check the verb. You check the gender. You remember, at the last possible second, that the adjective also has opinions on the matter.

    Then you say it.

    And the Italian person understands you.

    There is a brief, glorious moment of triumph.

    I have done it.

    I speak Italian.

    Unfortunately for you, the Italian person has reached the same conclusion.

    And replies.

    In Italian.

    At speed.

    This is where everything goes wrong.

    Because the sentence I just produced was not evidence of fluency. It was a small, carefully engineered linguistic structure that took considerable planning and possibly divine intervention to construct.

    I do not have another one ready.

    Meanwhile, the Italian person has moved on.

    Allora…

    I know that word.

    Something something something.

    Invece…

    I know that one too…

    Something something domani something something lavoro something.

    Excellent. Tomorrow. Work. We have nouns.

    At this point, I stop listening to Italian and begin conducting forensic analysis.

    I collect every word I recognise, lay them out on an imaginary table and attempt to reconstruct what has just happened.

    This is surprisingly effective.

    It is also exhausting.

    The sensible thing, of course, would be to admit defeat.

    Puoi parlare più lentamente, per favore?

    A perfectly respectable sentence.

    Alas, sensibility and I parted ways years ago, and that Italian person is already enthusiastically halfway through paragraph four.

    So I nod.

    Sometimes I say sì.

    Sometimes I deploy capisco with a confidence entirely unsupported by the evidence.

    This is dangerous.

    There is always the possibility that I have just enthusiastically agreed to something.

    I don’t know what.

    Perhaps dinner.

    Perhaps marriage.

    Perhaps helping someone move a wardrobe on Saturday.

    This is why I have developed a new theory about language learning.

    Being misunderstood is not failure.

    Being misunderstood is safety.

    If I say something incomprehensible. the other person slows down. They ask questions, They help.

    But pronounce one sentence rather well and suddenly everyone has expectations.

    So yes, I want to speak Italian fluently someday.

    I want to understand conversations without mentally tackling individual words to the ground as they rush past.

    I want allora to be merely allora, rather than a small life raft appearing on the horizon.

    But until then, I would like the Italian-speaking world to understand something.

    If I say something surprisingly competent, please do not be alarmed.

    It was probably an accident.

    And whatever you do, do not respond at full speed.

  • The Knight, the Cabbage, and Other Italian Situations

    The Knight, the Cabbage, and Other Italian Situations

    There comes a point in learning a language when you begin looking for ways to incorporate it into things you already do.

    In my case, this seemed obvious.

    I am learning Italian.

    I am learning chess.

    Why not learn chess in Italian?

    Two birds. One stone. Possibly several casualties.

    A Sensible Beginning

    I started, naturally, with the names of the chess pieces.

    The king is il re.

    The queen is la donna.

    The rook is la torre.

    The bishop is l’alfiere.

    The pawn is il pedone.

    And the knight is il cavallo.

    So far, so good.

    Except apparently my brain had other plans.

    Because when the moment came to retrieve the Italian word for knight, I confidently produced:

    Il cavolo.

    Only il cavolo is not a horse.

    Il cavolo is a cabbage.

    However, Italian – being the expressive language that it is – has also found other employment for the humble vegetable.

    Che cavolo!

    What the hell!

    Or, more literally and much more charmingly:

    What the cabbage!

    And why did cavolo apparently occupy a more accessible part of my brain than cavallo?

    Because Busuu had taught me Italian swear words.

    Of course it had.

    Incidentally, Busuu also taught me a stronger swear word – which also starts with the letter “C” – but that’s a story for another day.

    To be fair, cavallo and cavolo are dangerously close.

    One extra l separates a horse from a cabbage.

    This feels like an unreasonable amount of responsibility to place upon a single consonant.

    Especially since the knight is already the chess piece with which I have the most complicated relationship.

    Knights jump over other pieces.

    Knights fork other pieces.

    Knights appear on squares where I distinctly remember them not being five seconds earlier.

    And now my Italian knight has apparently abandoned the board entirely and joined the vegetable aisle.

  • Italian, Apparently

    Italian, Apparently

    I have been learning Italian for years.

    I can no longer remember why.

    This seems like something one ought to know before investing several hundred hours of one’s life in prepositions, verb conjugations, and the inexplicable number of ways Italians have devised to say “the”.

    I do, however, remember how I got here.

    It began with Bosnian.

    For several years I was in a relationship with a Bosnian man, so learning Bosnian seemed both romantic and practical. When the relationship ended, so did my motivation for learning the language.

    I moved on to French (the language, not the men).

    French sounded sophisticated. I imagined myself speaking it beautifully and becoming presumably, as elegant as Sylvie Grateau in Emily in Paris.

    Then I discovered that the French have a rather casual relationship between how words are written and how they are pronounced.

    Which is a little inconvenient for self-learners like myself.

    So I moved on.

    Spanish came next. Spanish was considerably more cooperative. Unfortunately, everybody and their uncle seemed to be learning Spanish.

    Apparently, even my choice of language needed to be slightly contrary.

    And that was how I arrived at Italian.

    It had much of what appealed to me about Spanish, the pronunciation was reassuringly predictable, and fewer people seemed to be learning it.

    Perfect.

    Years later, I am still learning Italian.

    I have since visited Italy and accumulated courses, books, apps, and podcasts. I have conjugated verbs while waiting for the train. I have abandoned methods, returned to others, forgotten vocabulary I distinctly remember learning, and occasionally produced an entire sentence without first constructing it in English.

    I still couldn’t tell you exactly what I’m going to do with Italian when I finally become fluent.

    But perhaps that stopped being the point somewhere along the way.

    For now, I keep learning it.

    Apparently, Italian and I are in a long-term relationship now.