Today is the first day of the second year of me learning Italian. In other words, yesterday was one year since I started. I had no great plan. I just wanted something to fill those long winter nights that wasn’t wasting my time. Why did I pick Italian? Well, when I was much younger, I’d studied Spanish and French to a reasonable level and obtained a smattering of German. I wanted something that wouldn’t be too difficult, in terms of the structure of the language being different from what I was used to and that left me with two possibilities I was interested in – Italian or Portuguese. And, even though Portuguese is almost certainly spoken far more widely than Italian, I preferred the sound of Italian. As you can tell, pretty scientific.
I just wanted something to fill those long winter nights that wasn’t wasting my time.
So, I downloaded Duolingo, because at the time I had no idea there were so many other language-learning apps out there, and began my journey. Repetition, after repetition, after repetition.
Being an introvert, I much preferred this type of solo language learning, where I was only making a mess of things in front of myself. There was no teacher marking me, or correcting me, (okay, yes, there was an owl) and things went apace. As it happens, Italian is one of the shorter courses. This means that, near the end, you get bombarded with so many verb forms you have no chance of coming out of it without tearing your hair out, but, as far as I’m concerned, it was also the perfect length. I finished the course in five months. That is quick, but when I set my mind to something, I keep going.
By that time, I had also read one novel in Italian. Yes, it was an easy novel. It was a translation of a cosy mystery. And yes, it was really tough at the start, but I got there. I have since completed another three novels and am about to finish a fourth. Reading is much easier now. Over the year I have also watched a tonne of YouTube videos in, and on, Italian and watched two different Italian TV series – actually, I’ve watched three, because I watched one on YouTube, too. I now truly believe that the input method is far superior to the classroom method when learning a language (maybe I’ll talk about that another time).
Can you imagine that? Having to write in a different form of the language when writing a novel, or a short story?
How am I going to bring this back to writing? Well, interesting fact. The past tense that’s used in Italian literature is a tense that isn’t used in normal daily life by many Italians (there are some areas that do use it, but most don’t). Can you imagine that? Having to write in a different form of the language when writing a novel, or a short story? As if writing fiction wasn’t hard enough. (This also makes reading in Italian more difficult, until you get used to it, because you don’t really need to learn this tense for your own use. You simply need to recognise it.) Plus, you only use this tense for the narrative. If someone’s speaking, you use the more common past tense.
So, that’s your interesting fact for the week. I wonder if there are any other languages that do this? Maybe, I’ll look that up.
Until next time, which, hopefully, won’t be another whole year.
Juliet Boyd 