Italian like a delicate pencil drawing

A little more than half way through now!

I took German in school for six years. Spanish for one, we didn’t get along. But I’ve always been attracted to French. Like we would be a cute match.

Language studies were my thing in school. It came easy to me. I don’t think I have ever been more devoted to my studies than when I trained for being an assistant nurse. This came as a surprise to me as I wasn’t really on for the profession. But I figured out why. Learning every bone and organ in the body in Latin was nothing less than language studies and I just couldn’t help myself being bent over my books late all night!

Winter 2002 was a hard one. I was working on a documentary project for the European Broadcast Union and it was absolutely killing me. Spring came, I was finally out of it, and I laid my eyes on an ad in a newspaper offering language classes abroad. Studying French in Nice, of course, of course!!

Well, it turned out that taking Italian in Florence was less expensive, and hey, why not?!

I had never even glanced at Italian before, but here I was suddenly, late April in Florence, trying to learn a language I didn’t know a word of in a small group of German, Canadian, Japanese and American students, even a guy from Seattle! Our Italian teachers didn’t know any English, so this mix was quite an adventure.

The class was running extremely fast. The morning hours were every day filled with new grammars, and in the afternoons I was sitting outside the Dome, next to Ponte Vecchio, or at Piazza della Signoria going through my notes, trying to make sense of everything squeezed into my little head.

My roommate was a Japanese girl who didn’t know a word of English. Since my Japanese wasn’t quite there, there was no way for us to communicate what so ever. Although I, of course, kept speaking English anyway, I don’t know why, I could have walked around the apartment speaking Swedish for all that I know! Anyhow, at the end of my two-week stay we could actually communicate in three word sentences in our now common language Italian, and it’s actually hard to express the feeling when that happened. Pure happiness! We had conquered a giant obstacle, and this has to be how children feel when they get through to their parents in words instead of noises and cries!

When I left Italy after two extremely intense weeks, I felt like I had been run over by a jet plane. But I had really grown attracted to Italian. I loved the sounds, the speed, and the passionate way of expressing the most ordinary things.

The years to come, I took some evening classes to learn more. And then I found another ad. “Learn Italian like a child does!”

This was a self-studying course. Perfect! I had been thinking about that for a while. The ad was a little bit funny though. It looked like something from the Fifties. A pencil drawing with a text. But there was a website that looked a bit more promising. I ordered the class and some days later a brown card board box arrived.

In 2008 the Fifties arrived on my desk. The box was packed with stacks of thin yellow booklets. They looked like something I would have found at my bakers cottage attic, left there by my mother’s aunts. I opened them up. They were filled with text (and I mean filled), top to bottom, only once in a while interrupted by tiny delicate pencil drawings, a perfect image for that time and age.

It was interesting though. The text was only in Italian. No translations. And under the text lines phonetic transcriptions. You learn the language by a text where words are repeated in different contexts until you actually get it. There is also a dictionary following the chapters if you get stuck. And a manual, which explains the purpose of each chapter, what you are supposed to learn.

Boy, was this funny! The complete course is 50 chapters divided on 16 booklets. If you are an ambitious student working through one chapter a week you are done with the course in a year and you have a vocabulary of 4000 words. But I tell you, that’s a lot of work! This class is as intense as the one in Florence, although different.

The Fifties design and approach was a concern to me though. I checked with my dear friend Agneta who is an Italian teacher: am I learning a kind of Fifties Italian here? She looked through the first chapters and approved of them, quite impressed by the grammatical ambitions.

So, I took my assignment on! I was aiming for a chapter a week, but then I found a tumor in my breast and made it one chapter per chemo treatment instead. And after the 6^th and last treatment my brain shut down and I was incapable of any kind of studies.

My yellow booklets had a rest for about a year, and then I started all over again, repeating everything from the beginning. Summer 2012 I was back to where I was interrupted and decided on studying five minutes a day. Yeah, that’s not a lot, but I figured that’s something I could actually do.

And I have. Five minutes after writing my journal in the evening. The last thing I do before lights out is filling my brain with Italian words and grammars. That’s my daily brain-workout. At midnight. Some do Wordfeud, some sudoku, some cross words. I am learning Italian.

Now, five minutes a day doesn’t add up to a chapter a week. It’s more like a chapter a month. So it took me a while to get back to my Italian support Agneta for a check up. And when I did it turned out that Italian had changed from the Fifties after all… I am now finding out that I am learning an Italian that is only still spoken on Sicily and in the southern parts of Italy. The most conservative areas of the country. If all.

I am laughing long and hard at this. I find it quite funny. I learned how to play bar chords on my grandmother’s old hard stringed guitar. On that foundation every guitar thereafter was a piece of cake. I am fantasizing my Fifties Italian will work the same way!

Agneta, who besides teaching Italian, French and English also has a head for numbers is telling me five minutes a day makes half a high school course in one year. That’s not bad! And since my late night class actually varies between 7 and 15 minutes, I guess I am in fact doing one full high school course a year!

So, 50 chapters. And I am just now finishing up chapter nr. 26. I do not have a head for numbers, but at the speed of a chapter a month doing the math tells me it will take me 24 more months to finish the course. Two more years before I have a vocabulary of 4000 Italian words. I wonder if I will know how to put them together? Will they still exist? And will I put them together in a way that not even Sicily or the most conservative southern parts of Italy will understand in 2015? Will I come across as a delicate pencil drawing?