The Heart of the Matter: The Third Time Around

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

"What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it."

Mark Twain

Not so, Mr. Twain! There’s hope. Read on.

This is my third time leading a group of students on a semester study abroad trip to Italy, the home of my ancestors. Being a typical third generation U.S. American, I seldom heard Italian in my parents’ home, but often heard Neopolitan in my maternal grandparents’ home of a Sunday. I had some sense of what Neopolitan sounded like and I thought that it was Italian. It wasn’t until I tried studying Italian before coming to Italy in 2004 that I realized the bits of language I had heard were quite different from “standard” Italian. I studied Italian casually before coming in 2004, studied it haphazardly upon arrival in Florence that year – I was able to sit in on “conversation” classes in the afternoon at the Scuola Leonardo da Vinci. These classes were more like monologues by an enthusiastic though self-concerned and highly opinionated instructor. I didn’t learn an awful lot in terms of the structure of Italian, but between what I could learn in class, study on my own, and remember from Spanish cognates, I managed to make some progress. I would say I left Florence after three and a half months as a somewhat intermediate user of the language, with vast deficiencies and blind spots.

The second time I came was under the same circumstances in 2007, a group of students and a stay of about the same length of time. I had done some study with a tutor once a week for a few months in Santa Barbara, and I became fairly good at translating from news articles I downloaded from La Repubblica website. Even though I was translating at a higher level, I still had these deficiencies and blind spots. Toward the end of our time together, my tutor began to focus more systematically on grammar, and I profited from this. It happened that my tutor moved back to Italy and to Florence, so I resumed once a week lessons with her there. I also resumed sporadically attending the afternoon conversation class at Scuola Leonardo da Vinci. My vocabulary level jumped as did my ability to use grammar accurately under precise circumstances under my tutor’s probing. I could read fairly well and was making progress in attempting simple fiction. When I left, I was again somewhere in the vast pool of intermediate users of Italian.

I am in Rome with yet another group of study abroad students for a semester. This is my third time in Italy, and I have the opportunity to study grammar and conversation twice a week in Rome at Scuola Leonardo da Vinci. Although I have just begun, my classmates have gone through the system there and “covered” the basics of Italian grammar. Our classes thus far have focused on using subjunctive, gerund and participle forms in complex sentences. This is a real challenge for me because I don’t have the background in higher level grammatical structures, so I have to learn it as we go along. Before coming this time, I didn’t study Italian much, glancing at La Repubblica on line once in a while, and opening a self study book for a few weeks before arrival.

Where am I?

The questions I pose myself are the following: What did I fall back on after arrival? What was the Italian I retained? Can I bring back from memory all or most of what I had learned before? Of the different elements of language: grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pragmatic use, semantics, and the four skills, which ones have I retained and to what extent?

Stephen Krashen famously wrote of the din in your head, the activation of the language learning facility in a person immediately before language came forth, a kind of mental to physical readiness to use the language. I don’t know whether coming back to Italy activated that din, if it exists, but what is going on in my head is reading and repeating, then analyzing all the language I can read and can hear around me. I even repeat bits of conversation as I hear them on the street. This certainly has helped to bring me back to some of what I had learned previously. So I fall back on my comfort with Italian sounds and my ability to make sense of bits of language and language I can read.

I am not sure that I have recaptured all the Italian I learned. Perhaps I will. What I can say is that I have the same uncertainties about the areas where I felt uncertain before. That is to say the blind spots that I began to recognize in my language learning again became clear as I entered the language environment. I do find that the Italian I learned has mostly come back in terms of fixed expressions, collocations, routines, and simple grammatical patterns. It was in my memory, but not immediately useable or reachable before I returned here.

So, grammatically, I am making progress while not quite feeling comfortable with my mastery of Italian grammar, especially the use of verb tenses together. Some points have become clearer and some bits of rote learning are still to be recovered. For example, I am more comfortable with agreement of verb participles and objects than I had been before, although I had worked on verb tenses enough to remember the simple conjunctive, imperfect conjunctive, and the compound tenses, now I have to go back and relearn most of them.

My vocabulary seems to be increasing at a decent rate and words once used are rapidly returning. I find that I am now comfortable discussing in Italian with Italian instructors school-related issues such as students having trouble with their Italian courses.

Pronunciation has never been an area of struggle for me. I am a fairly good mimic, so my Italian pronunciation has been something I could fall back on to “pass” doing simple chores in shops and markets.

In terms of pragmatics, I am comfortable with the various social and situational uses of language although I did use the word “maestro”the other day to our Italian instructor, who asked me whom I was talking about when I was talking about him. He explained that “maestro”” in a school context is usually reserved for the instructors of elementary school children. I had thought I could use maestro as a sort of jocular honorific term for my instructor, but it didn’t play very well with him.

In terms of semantics, I have become more sensitive to word order as an indicator of meaning and of the great number of false cognates that seem to exist between English and Italian. I didn’t bring this with me. It wasn’t something I had linguistically. It’s something I am learning more clearly now.

Finally, in terms of the four skills, I have always found reading approachable, listening useful, while speaking (mostly in phrases and short conversations) and writing have lagged a bit behind. My great breakthrough this time around has been listening comprehension. I used to sit in front of the television to watch “Chi Vuol’Essere Millionario” (“Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”), my first times here. With a dictionary in hand. I would read the questions and answer choices printed on the screen and look up the words so that I could learn them. Now I hardly need to look up most questions and answers and I understand most of the banter between Geri Scotti and his contestants. This has been a source of great satisfaction to me.

So, what can I conclude about this sort of haphazard language learning on the part of an adult learner from a basically monolingual culture? First, whatever time I put into conscious learning previously seems to have paid off in so far as memory triggers are bringing back that learning. Secondly, that repeated exposure can raise proficiency level over time even without continuous exposure to the language. Finally, that language learning, at least for this adult, does not necessarily become more difficult as one ages, rather when faculties decline such as sight and hearing, we need to compensate for those losses, but our learning ability is hardly diminished. So take heart all you Baby Boomers! You don’t necessarily need a guide in Italy if you study some Italian. It’s like everything else in life – if you put in the time, you will learn.