I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The negative reviews, that is, the ones that said, “Wi-Fi here is really terrible.” Yes.
I’m uncomfortable in countries where I don’t speak the language. My short-term experiences in Italy, which include two Italians playing a joke by helping me onto a train going south rather than north at 2:00 a.m., suggest that in much of Italy, solo Italiano is to be expected. So while others are blogging this spring, I will be trying to learn enough of the language not to embarrass myself at the local trattoria.
My choices here in Connecticut are many. I can take a beginning course in Italian free at the college where I teach. I can attend a community-learning course at my local library. I can buy CDs or download a curriculum from Rosetta Stone. I can buy one of the dozens of Italian for Dummies-type books out there. I can download an app for my iPod. Decisions, decisions!
I haven’t learned a new language in 35 years. I became fluent in French and German by first learning them in school and then immersing myself. I spent a semester at a lycée in Belgium, two summers working as a pastry salesgirl in France, and four months as a waitress at a ski hotel in Austria. I was seeking adventure, not language fluency, but as anyone who’s had similar experiences can attest, after awhile you open your mouth and phrases start spilling out. In my twenties, living in Southern California, I determined to learn Spanish and signed up for a community-college course, where I found myself frustrated simultaneously by the apparently slow pace and my own inability to memorize at the speeds I had been used to.
Fast forward to 2014. I decided against the free intro college course, perhaps inadvisedly, because I figured its focus on grammar would be more than I needed, both in terms of the week-in-Tuscany goal and in terms of my own background in Latin as well as French. Conversational Italian, I told people, was what I was seeking. But before spending hundreds of dollars on Rosetta Stone, I thought I’d give the $5.99 iPod app, 24/7 Tutor, a try.
As far as it goes—and I expect other apps are similar—it’s not bad. For each level, I get a list of vocabulary, including handy phrases like dov’è il bagno, and various approaches to learning the list—multiple choices, puzzles, spelling, and speaking with audio feedback. The lists increase in complexity to phrases like Everything is so interesting! and Let’s go to the seashore. We’re not exactly discussing Dante, but that’s not our goal.
On the other hand, I don’t see how anyone who doesn’t already understand (in this case) romance languages can possibly memorize all these phrases. What sense can it make that giorno and pomeriggio take buon whereas sera and notte take buona? When you ask, familiarly, for a name, how are you supposed to remember not only to use ti but also to make the verb chiami when in the formal you use si and chiama? For such things, obviously, you have to grasp the nuances between the familiar and the formal and the convention of gendered nouns. As I work through my simple lessons, I find myself going online—and yes, I’ve now ordered a book—to conjugate the verbs, with their always fascinating irregularities. I’ve also gotten the basic rule about the pronunciation of the consonant c—though, again, had I not experienced similar conventions about pronunciation in other romance languages, I’d be going a little nuts with ci and chi and c’è and come.
And then I wonder: What about all these questions we’re asking? Where’s the bathroom, what sort of work do you do, what’s happening? Do the people who create these apps realize that travelers may actually ask these questions and get answers? “The bathroom? Well, it’s around the corner, behind the barbershop, 20 paces then turn left, you can’t miss it, there’s a public WC where you have to pay half a euro.”
Conversation, I think. That’s a two-way street, isn’t it?
The gold standard for these programs is supposedly Rosetta Stone, which is expensive and doesn’t get particularly good reviews. Its philosophy is “immersive,” in that nothing is given in English, but having been immersed, I know the difference between 24 hours a day among the petite bourgeoisie and 20 minutes a day in front of my computer. Moreover, as a review in The Economist of Rosetta Stone’s Mandarin program points out, the one-size-fits-all approach of its pedagogy slams up against the idiosyncrasies of individual languages. “If you’re good at this kind of thing—if cracking brain-teasers in the Sunday paper is your idea of fun—you might well enjoy the challenge,” the reviewer notes; otherwise, you’re going to want to combine the program, as I’ll do with my $5.99 app, with a more traditional book.
Finally, there’s the test of actually speaking the language with a native. A friend who’s dating a French Canadian asked recently if I’d spend a few lunches speaking French with her so she can prepare to impress his family, and of course je suis ravie to do so. Rosetta Stone offers the Studio, live video tutoring with native speakers, that would seem to justify its high cost. But as another clever language-learning sort, Benny Lewis of Fluent in 3 Months, points out, social-media sites will yield native language speakers almost anywhere—and, like me, they’re usually delighted to spend a few minutes chatting in a tongue they love.
Okay, I’m off. Divertiti while I’m gone. And if anyone has recommendations for vineyards near Siena or better language approaches for all us casual travelers, do let us know.