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.