Casa Dante in Perano: good wine, bad Wi-Fi
Having left my post at Lingua Franca four months ago to work on a book and (very incidentally) dabble in Italian, I thought I’d launch my return (Sono tornata = I have returned) with a report. Thanks to a Lingua Franca commenter, I spent about 10 minutes a day from February to late May on the website Duolingo, earning lingots and hearts and wondering why this website seemed so obsessed with cooking in the kitchen. (Where else would you cook?) When I was out of town or idling away a few minutes at the dentist, I hauled out my iPod and worked with the more conversationally based 24/7, whispering phrases like Puoi aiutarmi a trovare into the tiny microphone and ignoring the raised eyebrows around me.
By the time I boarded my flight to what I’d begun dreaming of as the Land of Good Wine and Bad Wi-Fi, I knew just enough to know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know tenses. Anything that happened ieri, forget about it. From the conversational Italian I’d picked up (Sono nata in California = I was born in California), I’d gathered that past tense was formed from the root of the infinitive, but I had no notions about preterite or progressive, and no time to develop them. I could say Vorrei un bicchiere di vino bianco and know that I was saying I would like rather than I want a glass of white wine, but I remained ignorant as to the conditional in general and unable to use it in any other way.
I knew the formal/informal distinction existed, but at what level, and in what circumstances, and whether the formal meant addressing “you” always as third-person singular, or whether there was a second-person plural variation, utterly confused me. This was a consequence, in part, of my haphazard learning approach (a living, breathing teacher would have answered such questions), but it was also a result of the inconsistency built into the programs I was using. 24/7, for instance, made a point of noting that Ti fa male? (“Does it hurt?”) was written in the familiar, but gave no such indicator for Quanto ti devo dare? (“How much do I owe you?”), which likewise uses the familiar ti. And Duolingo allows both Dove sei? and Dove siete? as translations for “Where are you?” but it’s unclear whether the “you” here is being interpreted as both singular and plural or as both informal and formal.
Well, I thought as I settled in for the movie and the airplane meal, I probably won’t use any of it, anyway.
Readers, I have returned to tell you I was wrong.
First, to my consternation and delight, the Italians I met, primarily in the villages of Tuscany but also in larger cities, heard my clumsy overtures (Ho bisogno di qualcosa per decongestionante) and responded in Italian and only Italian. When the conversation got too thick, I’d grab at Parli inglese? or Parli francese?, but once they’d heard those initial vowel-ending words from me, I got no traction with other languages. So I was forced back on my scramble of words and phrases. They forgave my cascade of errors far more readily than I did. When I managed to conclude a complete conversation—like the one with the bartender at the local pub our first night in the countryside, where I begged him to grind me enough coffee for four people for morning because I’d mislaid the packet I’d bought in Siena, and we discussed the difficulty of gathering all one’s belongings off the belt at the crowded supermercato—I wanted to kick up my heels.
Second, of our small group of four, I was the only one speaking Italian at all. Ten minutes a day made me an expert. The effects were mostly hilarious. I got called over at an open-air market to engage in a series of questions about unrecognizable leafy vegetables that turned, as far as I could tell, into an argument among the locals over rughetta versus what we know as arugula. We found our way to our hotel in Rome, toward the end of the trip, via GPS, only to confront one-way streets that prevented our getting closer than three blocks. So the friend driving dropped the rest of us and reset the GPS to the rental return place, and I set about asking directions. By then, I actually felt competent, but as we made our way past the church and around to the left and left again up the alley toward the gate with the fountain, my dependent pals kept asking, “Are you sure? Shouldn’t we get someone who knows English?”
Well, ta-dum. By navigating to the hotel, I suppose I triumphed. But more, I’ve triumphed by evolving from a nonspeaker of Italian to a really poor, rudimentary speaker of Italian. Some nights and mornings in the exquisite Tuscan countryside, I talked myself to sleep or woke myself up going through the phrases I knew, combining them to form new ones. Many things about being in Italy brought pleasure, but engaging with the words, for me, ranked high on the list. Mi piace parlare italiano. Now maybe I’ll actually study the language.