Ripasso II: La lingua

This post will focus on what I learned about language during the semester.  My Italian comprehension did improve quite a bit over the course of the semester.  Case in point: I read my history of the family professor's over the course of two weeks at the beginning of the semester, and understood it fairly well.  In the week before the exam, I took notes on the book over the course of 5 days, with what I'd call 95% comprehension.

LANGUAGE LESSON 1:  Comprehensive and expressive abilities are not the same thing.  I am much better at reading and listening to Italian than I am at writing and speaking it.  That's more or less true of my English as well; I don't speak with the vocabulary of the texts I read for school.  I can listen to someone speak to me in Italian or read middling-level Italian texts without much of a problem.  My own speaking did not improve as much as I would like; my relationship with my roommates wasn't one of close friendship so we didn't speak very often, and the Italians I befriended later on spoke mostly in English.  I think I underestimate myself here though: I was able to hold conversations about non-mundane topics like culture and politics in Italian with Italians with mutual understanding.  Bologna is a great city to study Italian in, as it is very populous but without the tourists and thus demands use of the language.  I did find it a bit irritating, though, when some cashiers immediately addressed me in English, before I said anything, because they could tell by my dress that I was foreign.

LANGUAGE LESSON 2:  Thought is not strictly words.  This is going to be hard to explain.  When I'm preparing to say something in another language, there's definitely a moment when my mind needs to prepare for it.  Whenever I entered a bar (a bar is a general snack/coffee* shop, the drinking establishments we call bars are usually called pubs in Italy) there would be a brief moment of mental focus as I prepared to speak in a way that wasn't quite automatic.  This actually lasted for a few days after coming home, during which I would pointlessly feel a tiny bit apprehensive before making an order at Zita's ice cream shop at home.  I've passed the phase of learning Italian where I think in English first and then translate in my head, I can think in Italian for simple things without first preparing an English transcript.  Gaining this ability has a side effect: if I'm not in English mode, but the Italian words aren't coming to me, I won't have any words to say at all.  Imagine this thing:

Your mind immediately says dog.  Mine does now too.  There were times, however, when I'd be in the middle of an Italian conversation, more or less thinking in Italian, and I'd need to express that thing, but my mind couldn't decide whether it wanted to label it dog or cane.  I'd be without a word, with nothing but the essential concept of that dog-cane in my mind.  Ideas can exist in your mind without the words to label them.  Imagine the tip-of-your-tongue feeling.  This brain torn between two languages would affect my English as well.  I definitely had a bizarrely difficult time expressing myself in English sometimes.  I recall once forgetting the word left, as in the opposite of right.  I had to say "that side" and point.

On that note, let me comment on the amount to which I've internalized Italian.  I have some simple thoughts in Italian: I often think "Ho bisogno di..." instead of "I need..." or "Non posso..." instead of "I can't..."  Pronunciation when reading English is a bit off.  "CH" in Italian is always pronounced with the hard "K" sound, so words like "Chinese" and "church" look a bit off to me.  I'm getting used to silent vowels again: a few days ago I read about a product called "Sense," and thought it was a foreign word pronounced "sensay" before remembering that that's a basic English word pronounced "sens."  I said "Ecco la!" ("Here it is!") to point out to one of my friends a few days ago, thoroughly confusing them.

*Upon reviewing this post before publishing, I found that above I wrote "caffè" instead of "coffee" without noticing.  There you go.

LANGUAGE LESSON 3: Mentally distinguishing between foreign languages isn't as hard as I expected.  This is more or less the opposite but what I just wrote, but oh well.  When I traveled to Spain, France, and England, I had no problems adjusting to using the basics for simple exchanges.  Spanish, French, and Italian are nothing but poorly-spelled versions of each other, and yet I was able to distinguish between different " mental modes" (mind you, I know very little Spanish and about three words in French) in each country.  The point is that at a shops in Paris, I said "Merci" after each exchange as if it were automatic, with no inclination to say "Grazie" or "Thank you" instead  (saying "Merci" actually carried over a few days into Italy after I returned).  In Spain, "Donde esta la estacion?" came easily without the urge to say "Dov'è la stazione?"  Despite their similarities (my travel mates' conclusion was that Spanish simply sounds like fast Italian, with more Ss), the languages were distinct in my mind.  I used to think it'd be very hard for me to learn Spanish because my Italian would creep into it, but now I think I could probably keep them apart.

LANGUAGE LESSON 4: Attitudes towards English.  This is the less theoretical of the three.  English is the global language at this point, and you can get around in any of Italy's major tourist cities (Rome, Florence, Venice, Pisa) with it with no problems.  Many people in Bologna spoke it; as I said, they'd sometimes speak to me with it before I opened my mouth.  I was discussing this with an Italian girl I was paired with for language exchange, and she surprised me by saying that she felt it was a point of embarrassment not to know if if you were spoken to in it.  She seemed to imply that not knowing English made you uncultured or unworldy.  This was a shock to me: if I'm in a foreign country, it's certainly my problem if I don't speak the local tongue. I didn't expect anyone to speak English in Spain or France, and accepted that I'd be at a disadvantage before I left.  The French definitely had a different attitude about this than my exchange partner: I'd heard they were less receptive of English-speakers (Emily says they're very proud and protective of their language, with their language authority actively promoting unique French versions of modern English words like "computer," though it's been a losing battle), and while English was certainly the second language of Spanish and Italian signage, Paris was much more adherent to French, despite its booming tourist business.  The Louvre, the world's most visited museum, has most of its exhibit labels in just French.

That said, Italians who didn't expect us to speak Italian were delighted when we did.  I recall a waiter in the modern city of Pompeii who approached us and said something bizarre in English we couldn't make sense of, probably gotten from Google Translate.  When we said "Parliamo italiano," he breathed a sigh of relief and congratulated us.

A lot of exchange programs (those based in the touristy cities, like Rome and Florence) don't require language knowledge to study there.  Personally, I think that attitude is disrespectful, and despite its limiting effects I think Cornell's got a sensible policy in that you can't study abroad without studying the local language for a few semesters first.  To spend that much time in a country without being able to communicate with its people is to view the whole place as a museum and to effectively ignore the millions of lives around you.  Short bursts are reasonable, or else no one would ever be able to travel, but to effectively be a tourist for six months is unappealing to me.

Ripasso I: L'istruizione

I left Italy about a month ago, for some inexplicable reason.  I had planned on writing up some "review" posts to capture the whole experience upon my return.  This blog ended up being somewhat of a travel blog and thus excluded the details of my day-to-day experience, so these posts are intended to really capture the meat of the experience, concentrated down into somewhat of a flimsy, tofu-like meat substitute for your consumption.  I sat on the assignment for a while, so I hope that now that I've started I'll be more inclined to add on to this.

One last journey: in the last week I spent in Bologna after returning from Paris, Bianca and I took a trip to Rimini and San Marino.  Rimini as a city didn't particularly stand out in my mind, except that it had a beach, which doesn't stick out in my mind among all the various beach's I've seen.  San Marino was neat; for those out of the know it's an independent republic within Italy, just like the Vatican.  It sits on a mountaintop, and Wikipedia tells me it's the world's oldest state, and that it owes its longevity to the fact that whenever an aggressive Pope or Napoleon came knocking, they simply welcomed them with open arms, made nice, and were allowed to stay.  There were great view from the height, and the whole thing is basically a fortress-city built into a mountain.  Cool.

The core of this post is devoted to the Italian education system (istruizione means "education," not educazione, which refers to the way a person is raised in terms of things like manners and ethics.  Language teachers call traps like that "false friends," and they lead to hilarious mistakes.  Most famously, preservativo does not mean "preservative.")  I took five courses this semester:

- BCSP's pre-session grammar course
- BCSP's main grammar course
- BCSP's history of Italian politics course
- Unibo's history of the family course
- Unibo's history of the Italian language course
(Unibo = University of Bologna)

I won't talk here about the BCSP courses, as they were more American-style and largely unlike the Italian courses, except for the grading scale.  Italy (and Europe in general?  I'm not sure) grades on a 0-30 scale, just like they do with their temperatures.  My debate club at Cornell does the same thing, so maybe there's a common root there.

The best one-idea summary I can give of the Italian education system is as follows: The students are not part of the university.  In America, we definitely consider the students to be a part of any college or university, if not the core of it.  Cornell students are considered a part of the university just as much as the faculty.  In Italy, the faculty is the university, and the students are merely clients.  There is a substantial divide between students and faculty to the point of animosity.  Films about Italian college life always portray students up against an unfeeling, egotistic bureaucracy.  In class, the professors seem to talk at you, not to you,  My history of the family teacher, I eventually realized, was reading practically verbatim from her book.  There was no effort to be engaging, their only job is to present information.  That isn't to say they aren't sometimes better than that- my history of the language professor was a better lecturer, but more on him in a moment.

The students, not a part of the university, have no sense of class.  I don't mean that in that they have no sense of taste or style, I mean that our idea of the "Class of 'XX" has no meaning there.  They graduate when they individually finish, not together.  I don't believe there are any university-sponsored clubs.  The university is simply an institution that provides professors who lecture and offer exams, that is all.  You get an email account as a signing bonus.  Within this structure, each individual facoltà (schools within the college, like Cornell's) is highly autonomous, and the professors are further autonomous within that structure.  We were told by the program that professors were masters of their classes.  They decided the schedules, when the exams would be, and the appropriate workload.  They were free to begin and end within the allotted time: both my professors never used their full two hours, and frequently showed up late.

Not that you're required to attend class.  Your performance in the course is graded entirely on the final exam.  You're free to just do the readings, or none at all, and show up as you please.  I'm fairly certain one of my roommates never went to class, though he was a science major so the textbooks were probably better than rote lecture.  The exam dates are more or less independent of the course's run, and there are several held a year.  If you screw up once, you can try again next semester (though "semester" is also a nebulous concept).  My family professor seemed to offer an exam session every month, a single block of time during which any students from any of her courses could stop by to take the test.  The exam (with exceptions, though both of mine were like this) are oral and incredibly subjective.  The professor sits you down and you have a discussion with them about the topic, and then you get your grade.

My exams were a best-case and a worst-case scenario.  My history of the family exam was as follows: I was required to read a certain amount of pages from the professor's book and a list of others.  I read her book and two others.  At the exam, we didn't discuss her book (the content of the lectures) at all, and thank goodness because it was impossible to pay attention to her, and I was more or less free to discuss anything I wished from the books I elected to read.  I impressed her and got a good grade.

The history of the language professor was not so kind.  He had a separate exam day and reduced reading for the foreign students, and a number of other BCSP students and I studied together for the exam.  He asked very, very precise questions about his book.  In my case, he started broad (Why is Petrarch important?) before narrowing down to absurd levels of detail (Where was the book we just mentioned published?  What was its author's first name?), and we discussed only one part of a single chapter for the whole exam.  The professor, now a notorious villain among our circle of students, had a massive ego, a rude temperament, and a grudge against foreign students (despite his separate exam day and lessened workload).  I escaped with a respectable grade: I was told that I clearly knew the content and had studied, but didn't speak the language well enough, which has nothing to do with his course.  The man was a linguistic egomaniac.  Others were clearly treated extremely unfairly, graded based on his mood or their appearance (that happens to girls a lot, the culture is quite sexist).  Upon hearing of our problem, our program director spoke to him and somehow managed to touch the heart of the Grinch and get us all a grade boost.

The Italian education system works as follows: they don't teach you very well, and then they roll a die for your grade.  You may be asked anything; if you've memorized every sentence in a book except for the one you're asked about, you'll get a bad grade.  Apparently this creates problems at med schools, as some unprepared students retake exams until they get a question they know and are then allowed to move forward int eh medical field.  The method's only good quality is the amount of detail I had memorized for the exams: I haven't studied that hard or known a course's material so well since I took the AP exams in high school.  Of course, all that's gone now, but I've still got the books.

The next post will be a bit more positive, I promise.  The Unibo way of teaching might be the only dark spot in the whole experience.