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days_unfolding) wrote2024-07-06 05:10 am
My Relationship with Foreign Languages
One might ask, why were you studying Italian when you hadn't been to Italy yet? I was thinking of an answer to that, which led me to my relationship with foreign languages in general.
I grew up around foreign languages. My dad immigrated from Lithuania when he was a kid, and the older generation all spoke Lithuanian, which I did not know. My mom's family was from Poland, second generation, and a lot of the older relatives spoke Polish, which I don't speak either. Sometimes it was awkward, when I would hear "blah blah blah Adrienne blah blah blah," and I would sit there with a stupid smile on my face :) But hearing foreign languages is kind of soothing to me? I know that people complain about people speaking foreign languages around them, but I don't feel that way at all. Do I kick myself for not learning Lithuanian and Polish when I was a kid? You bet.
My school started foreign languages in middle school, around 12ish years old for folks not in the US. The choices were French or Spanish, and I took French. Thus began a long love affair with French. I took it from middle school into high school, and placed in Advanced Honors French at university. There I kept it up until I was taking classes with the people who were majoring in French, which I wasn't, so I dropped out. Why didn't you minor in French, Adrienne?
I still think in French occasionally. (I remember being mortified in high school when I found myself trying to translate French into French, not realizing what a good sign that was.) And it's there somewhere. One of the most annoying things about learning Italian is that when I think of how to say something in Italian, my mind pops up with the French first, and I think that the French is right. But the problem with living in the US is that you don't get a chance to use it. One of many reasons that I love the Internet is that it allows me to take language lessons over it. And when I go back and review my French, I suspect that I'll relearn it quite quickly. Last fall, I had a teacher for Italian and French who taught in Italian and French with very little English (just when I needed a word defined), and the French was much easier.
I also took a two-semester class in Chinese over a summer at the end of my university days because I needed some extra credit hours and it sounded cool. Well. Chinese is HARD. Hardest "B" I ever got. Plus I was sick of Chinese by the end of the summer. I remember none of it except "ni hao" (hello).
So, Italian. My mom loved Italy, and she was taking an informal Italian class at a nearby school. I did something similar, thinking that we could practice bad Italian together. I didn't like the class, but it got me interested in Italian. I bought Rosetta Stone in Italian, and worked with that a little, only to find that I didn't like it as a language-learning method. Then I saw an Internet ad for online tutoring, and I thought that I'd try Italian. I did that for a few months, but then my teacher needed to take some time off. In the meantime, I saw an post about a group Italian class that someone was having, so I joined it. I did the class for a few months and liked the teacher, but we were having problems finding a time that was good for everyone, so we switched to private lessons. That was working well, but then my teacher decided to go back to school for a Master's Degree, so he stopped teaching.
Somewhere in there, I fell in love with the language.
So, I was looking for an Italian teacher again. I chose someone who also taught French, thinking that it would be good to have someone who did both. This was the teacher who taught in Italian and French, which was good, but her idea of teaching was to march through the grammar book. I can teach myself grammar mostly on my own, but I really need conversation practice. Plus we had problems scheduling the Italian lessons, so I took more French lessons from her than Italian. Then I dropped out when I was moving and taking my programming classes. I intended to start back up with her, but decided that I didn't like the way that she was teaching.
So I'm in search for teacher #4. I hope that the teacher that Mimmo found will work out well. I intend to tell her to make me speak the language a lot. And also that I want to learn "practical Italian", so I can get myself in trouble wandering around Italy. And if we're reviewing grammar, let me do most of the work as homework.
I might need to learn Lithuanian someday because I'm eligible for a Lithuanian passport, which would give me an EU passport, which would make spending an extended length of time in Europe easier.
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I envy the ability to learn and speak more than one language. I took French from 7th grade through college, and couldn't master it. I have no ear for it. All it did was confuse me in regards to English spellings. I kept putting "e"'s on the ends of English words. My family doesn't have any facility for it. Even though my mother grew up hearing German - no facility and couldn't learn it.
My father grew up around his Grandmother speaking in French, but couldn't pick it up. And tried Russian - got a few phrases but that's it, or a rudimentary understanding. My brother tried Spanish and gave up. My niece - who probably had the best chance - didn't make it very far in French or Chinese. She hated her Chinese teacher - although she got an A- in the class. The problem with Chinese is it is a tonal language - similar to musical notes, or so I was told by my niece and brother. If you can't lower your voice or raise it to hit the right tones, the meaning changes.
I'd be lost. The other difficulty with Chinese - is there are so many different dialects and versions - with Mandarin being the main one, I think? I worked at a video game developer company once with a lot of Chinese immigrants - who taught me a lot about this. Also a Ukrainian immigrant who taught me about the Ukraine. And our boss was an immigrant from Jamaica.
It's hard to travel without a facility for languages, I think. Not impossible. But you're more dependent on guides, and the kindness of strangers. Then again, I live in NYC and hear about ten different languages every time I leave my apartment. Mainly Russian, Polish, Bengali, and Yiddish.
Also Spanish, French, and Italian. And Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Plus variations of Caribbean languages. I really have no idea what people are saying around me half of the time, and it doesn't bother me. I find it kind of cool - so I understand what you meant by that.
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