So, I moved to Italy knowing five phrase in Italian (thanks Claire!) and I am happy to say that I now know more, although not enough. I am taking Italian 101 at Gonzaga with 13 other students and a truly incredible professor.
We've learnt a lot of really useful rules, conjugations, phrases and words - things that for the most part I have already used in my daily life (I'm still a little too nervous to ask or give directions, but one day . . . ). However, we have only learnt the present tense. Which is insanely limiting. The next time you're talking to someone, try and only talk in the present tense, I dare you. It's hard! It means that I don't really use my Italian, unless I'm ordering at a restaurant. I'm getting pretty good at that these days, and have conducted meals using all, or nearly all, Italian! Yay for minor victories :) I just looked on the syllabus, and we're supposed to start learning the past tense soon, but I don't think future or conditional tenses will happen this semester. I hope I'll be able to continue classroom learning of Italian in the Spring, but if not, I know I need to work on my own anyway.
Because Florence is such a tourist attraction, most Italians here also speak English, which also makes it hard for me to practice. It's funny because sometimes I'll go into a store and ask for something, using Italian, and they'll answer me in English. The really nice shopkeepers will usually let me work through it, helping me with the words, or correcting my accent (which is bad - I never put the emphases where they're supposed to go).
I get really nervous though, before I'm going to be using my Italian. I practice what I'm going to say over and over in my head, even when it's really simple things that I've done before. Usually it works out, but sometimes I'll make a totally dumb mistake that I know how to do correctly. The worst/most embarrassing so far was when I was ordering kababs. I did all of the complicated parts correctly, and was trying to say that I don't want tomatoes. I knew how to say without, but I could not in that moment think of the word for tomatoes. So I hmmd and hmmd, and then finally had to say "senza . . . senza . . . tomatoes". The cook paused, said "pomodoro" really slowly and looked at me like I was a complete idiot - I was. I had already used new vocabulary, had said other food words that I did and didn't want, and couldn't come up with pomodoro, which is a word I knew before coming here. Oh man. I think it was my first time using pomodoro in connection to actual tomatoes and not to sauce or pizza, but still. I definitely should have known. On the plus side that was so embarrassing I hopefully won't make that mistake again. It'll be something else next time. :)
The other limiting factor is my vocabulary. On one of my Italian quizzes we had to say four things we do in our free time. I could say that I read books (leggo i libri), that I write emails to my friends (scrivo e-mails ai miei amici), and that I walk around Florence (cammino a Firenze) - but I couldn't think of vocabulary, or verbs, for other actions. So for the fourth thing, I said "vado in palestra e faccio ginnastica" which means that I go to the gym and workout. LIES! As you all know, I most definitely do not go to the gym and if I had fifty sentences in English to say what I do with my free time, that wouldn't even make the list. But, I know how to say it in Italian, so now my Italian teacher thinks that I workout.
This happens when asked about my weekend too, I can sometimes say where I went (I did learn the past tense of "I visited"), but it's very restrictive. So sometimes I'll just make up something that I did, or say that I didn't really do a lot, because I don't know the words. Hopefully that will change.
I am definitely understanding more though, which is good. I don't usually get most, or even half of the words, but I can usually get the gist of the conversation. Usually. On Friday though, I went to lunch with the Dean and the university's travel agent, and one said to the other "brutto tempo" which we've learned means bad weather. So I thought they might be talking about how it was supposed to rain all weekend. I felt pretty proud of myself, for catching that, and was kind of nodding along thinking about the rain. And then the Dean turns to me and says that they're talking about the Italian bureaucracy and how terrible it is and how inefficient everything in government is. Ok, so I have no idea if they were talking about the weather, and then really quickly switched and managed to have an entire conversation about bureaucracy in one sentence, or if brutto tempo can also mean bad times, or bad situation. Guess I'll have to ask in class tomorrow.
So for now, I will keep guessing at what people are saying, and will try to use my Italian even when I'm worried it won't be right. And hopefully, before ten years have passed, I will be passably proficient!
I just had a midterm for that class on Thursday, so I'll post back here and update on that when I get it back.
