MrWoodleigh

My Italian is still really bad, but I generally manage.  The Italians I talk to don’t seem to mind how badly I mangle their language.  Maybe those who have to listen to me ask for something have a laugh riot after I’m gone; that I can’t know.  I’ve learned to lace my primarily noun-based Italian with suggestive mumblings in English and very expressive gestures.  That’s key.  I also add per favore as often as I can to cancel out the indelicacy of my words. 

Another way I manage is to have Nina tell me what to say.  Kind of works for both of us.  She won’t speak Italian unless she can do so correctly.  She has to be able to use the verb in the correct tense, use the right preposition, have her adjectives and nouns agree in count and in gender — all that crap — before she’ll utter a word.  Even when she has it all lined up in her head, she’d rather not say anything to any actual Italian person.  

It is my belief that talking to Italians is a good idea for two reasons.  1)  It helps you get better at Italian 2) Italians actually can actually tell you useful things such as whether a particular loaf of bread you might want to buy has salt in it (it almost never does).  I want to talk to Italians, but as I said my Italian is bad, while Nina’s is good despite the fact that she doesn’t practice by speaking with Italians.  Earlier in her life she learned to speak excellent French without talking to the people she met in France and excellent Russian without talking to the people she met in the Soviet Union.   So when we’re out together I just ask her to tell me how to say it in Italian.   She works it out, then relays it to me.  I then repeat it to the actual Italian person, perhaps dropping a few sounds and changing a few others, but I get the point across.  Unfortunately, I rarely understand the response.  Often I think I understand, only to find out I completely misunderstood it.  This poses no problem because Nina understands everything the person says.  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Italy and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.