Category: Italian Language

My progress learning Italian

Language Learning for Executives

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I _really_ want this for my badge photo.

What if you became the leader of a team that spoke a different language from you? Maybe their native language was Spanish or Japanese or Arabic. Every day they spoke English at work, but on breaks they shifted to their mother tongue, without realizing it. Unfortunately, you can’t just drop in on a breakroom conversation, unless you’re going to force everyone back to English.

Would you learn their language? You know that high-performing teams require strong relationships. Learning their language would reduce miscommunication and build trust, right?

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Debrief of the Italy Mission

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That title sounds so spy-like. Debrief of the Italy Mission. I bet debriefings are incredibly boring – listening to someone drone on about all the mundane details of hours stuck in the surveillance van with bad takeout food and…wait, do my blog posts sound like that?

Here are the results of three months in Italy in a surveillance van

  1. I can impress a taxi driver
  2. I wish I’d started school earlier
  3. I slacked off
  4. I earned an art history degree

Impressing a taxi driver

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I chalk up taxi fares to the “language practice” budget.

Everyone knows that the best judge of language level is a taxi driver. And I passed with flying colors. He couldn’t believe I’d only been studying for two months. We talked about my year of travel, the Italian economy, and how to learn a language. I sounded confident, my accent was good, and most of the words came naturally.

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Back to School

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I thought long and hard about going back to school…

Monday I’m going back to school. Have pity on my teachers. I’m going to be quite the troublemaker.

Here’s what I want from the school

  1. Structure
  2. Friends
  3. Conversation – not grammar

Structure

Guess who doesn’t work very hard without a schedule? Yeah, that would be me.

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How to Learn to Speak Another Language

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Not "oastmasters"

Practicing my Italian with an audience

What’s the best way to learn another language? The answer must be move to a country that speaks it. (Otherwise this trip was a very bad idea.) Then you just soak up the sounds through osmosis while sipping Mai Tais or Mojitos or Belline. (I’m claiming that as the plural of Bellini.)

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Not a bellini, but still delicious…

Except our brains are lazy. They are very good at resisting any new skills that aren’t absolutely necessary. And it’s certainly possible to get by in most foreign countries using English and hand gestures.

So if I’m going to become fluent in three months I’m going to need a plan and discipline. (Though I really wish I could learn by drinking those Belline. I hate discipline.)  But it’s not going to be classes or Rosetta Stone software or even a top-secret computer program to beam the language directly into my brain, code-named The Intersect. (Very tempting, though. Especially if I get to work with Sarah Walker.)

No, I’m going to hack my way into the language. And if you want to play along at home, you can do this too.

Summary

  1. Find someone to speak with
  2. Prepare a conversation before it happens
  3. Refer to the Lonely Planet phrasebook
  4. Consult Google Translate
  5. Get over your pride

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Language Log – Italian

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I’m counting this as my first entry in my Italian Language Log. The first step is to state my goal for the language. I want to be able to:

  1. Communicate in Italian about errands in daily life: shopping, dining, transportation, lodging, banking, internet, etc.
  2. Tell my favorite stories and answer questions
  3. Tell jokes
  4. Get to know people: where they are from, what they do, what they like, where they travel
  5. Be playful
  6. Carry on a conversation for 15 minutes

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Italian Language Eccentricities

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No actual meat

Mmm…Chocolate Salami

 

What fascinates me about languages is the complete differentness of them all. As the great linguist Steve Martin once said about the French, “They have a different word for everything!” I have a collector personality, so I want one of each of them. (“Get your first foreign language today, collect all 7,000!”). 1

Highlights (for those who don’t feel like reading the whole thing):

  • Italian doesn’t use the letter s to make things plural.
  • The s is used at the front of a word to mean the opposite.
  • There are 7 ways to say “the.” Seven!
  • Google is working on a brain USB port

It’s not a secret that I’m fluent in French, pretty good in Spanish, and have dabbled in Portuguese, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Bengali, and Fon. (Yeah, that last one is a real language, spoken by about 2 million people in Africa and 25 returned peace corps volunteers when they’ve had too much to drink and start to reminisce about showing up at an African market and freaking out the locals with their authentic accents.) 2

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Fear of Failure

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Here comes diabetes.

There’s a Chocolate Fair this week!

My goal for the first 90 days is to learn to speak Italian. A few days ago I kept feeling I was going to fail at it. I was spending time on other activities, besides studying or speaking. I went walking. I took long lunches. I played computer games. It seemed like I wasn’t taking this mission seriously and I would have nothing to show for my three months in Italy. Which also meant I would fail at Japanese and German (of course). And the rest of my life really (just a logical conclusion).

...and alcoholism

Lunch in front of the Palazzo Vecchio

Then I realized I’d only been here for three nights. I had to catch up on sleep, fight jet lag, find an ATM, a grocery store, a cell phone plan, and a library card (of course).  So I told myself to chill. Just allow enough fear to motivate me to focus.

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