Learning a Language

When we lived in Italy the first time, Gabe didn’t really think about language. He was five, and while he enjoyed the intellectual challenge of translation, it was akin to playing Memory, that game where you match cards. His actual language training happened mostly by osmosis, in school. Which, perhaps to nobody’s surprise, is the far more effective way to learn Italian. By the end of the year, when we’d all become somewhat functional, we’d go to a restaurant in a town where people didn’t know us, and spend time ordering and bantering with the waiter while Gabe quietly drew pictures of gladiators. When prompted out of his zone, he’d look up and order his meal and the waiter would stare him before asking us, “How does this child speak Italian?” Wait, isn’t that we were just all speaking? Apparently not. At least not like Gabe. So I wondered how this year would be. It wasn’t the same, by any stretch. Not being in school was wonderful in many ways (no morning alarms!) but it does make language training more complicated. But he experimented and here is Gabe’s report of his experience, learning Italian. Again.

Learning a Language

When I lived in Italy 8 years ago, I attended first grade (prima) in Italian public school. Little 5-year-old me struggled through the first few months—I had to learn an entirely new language to even understand the directions, let alone the content. On my first day of school in this unknown place, I broke down within the first five minutes of class after the teacher instructed everyone to “tirate fuori i vostri quaderni” (take out your notebooks) and I couldn’t understand a thing.

While I continued to stumble through this new school environment, I was simultaneously learning to read in both English and Italian, meaning that I had a lot on my academic plate.

If I tried to learn both those languages now, my mind would grow muddled, and I’d speak an impossible to understand hybrid of the two languages. However, luckily for me, I had a far easier time learning both these back then, as learning a language is much simpler for young children.

Boy, do I wish it remained simple. 

My family travels to Italy every so often, always beginning with two weeks to a month in Spello. In between those trips, my knowledge of Italian drains away. This is why every time I return to Italy I have to relearn the necessary parts of the language.

This year was different. I would be spending an entire year in Italy, therefore I needed to learn much more of the language. At the beginning of the year, I learned from Italian books alongside my mother, but that method didn’t work for me and I didn’t learn all that much. So I decided to take lessons from our friend Angelo. Angelo had taught my brother Italian 8 years ago when he was 14 just like I am now, so it felt right that I would begin lessons like he did. 

Content with this new idea, I went off to my first lesson. 

Here’s the thing about Angelo.

He’ll tell these extremely long (partially fabricated) stories about this or that, and you can get way more out of them than you would get from learning verbs. I’ve found that the best way to learn is to speak and to listen, and his stories are the optimal way to do that. I went to these lessons twice a week, communicating for an hour-and-a-half in Italian each time. By the time we concluded the lesson, my mouth had gone dry from constant speaking and my head had been filled with stories to regale my family over lunch. 

Over time, the lessons skewed more and more towards dry grammar and vocabulary and less of these stories. I decided that before every lesson, I would think of some question to ask Angelo, like who was San Martino or why was the south of Italy more poor than the north. These questions could even be about something I already knew, it didn’t matter. Once Angelo got talking, he would continue talking for a good long while. 

Soon after I hit on this method of asking questions and began growing more confident with my speaking, Covid 19 cases peaked in Italy, and the rates in Spello rose as well. Because of this, we decided that it was unsafe to continue lessons until this all blew over. This meant that I had to find an alternative to learn Italian. 

When we visited Switzerland in February, my family and I started using Duolingo to learn German. The app offers plenty of ways to keep you motivated, such as streaks, achievements, leagues, etc…, so we all got reeled in, constantly learning and practicing our German, which greatly improved our speaking ability. Plus, it was fun to sit around the living room together doing Duolingo after a day of skiing.

I enjoyed using Duolingo so much, my family and I started using it for Italian once we returned the next month. However, I soon grew tired of the gimmicks. I felt like Duolingo forced me to keep up my streak and pressured me to advance in my league. Like the language apps I’ve used before, after about a month of use, my learning hit a point of diminishing returns. I lost my motivation and grew tired of the content. I gave up and for a solid month I didn’t learn any language at all, reading a bit in the Italian kids’ novel I got in Venice, but only speaking in little bits when I ran down to the convenience store, or walk a block to the bakery to bring back various confections.

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One day in April, Angelo told us he’d finally received his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine (which he pronounced “Pfieffer”). At last we could resume lessons. Remembering how after an hour of Angelo’s lessons my mind goes blank and I struggle to understand or remember anything said to me, we reduced the duration of the lesson to only 1 hour (although we usually go over). 

We all learn in vastly different ways. Whether it be virtual, visual, auditory, we all consume information in a unique way, and, in my opinion, that's what makes learning fun. This is especially the case in learning a language. Although I always retain a bit of knowledge, every time I return to Italy I relive the frantic reaching for words, stumbling over simple sentences, and eventually giving up and using nods and shakes of the head to communicate. The beginning is difficult, but as I got better and better, I learned more and more of the language, and once I reach a certain point, it feels invigorating to speak.

So if you are learning a language and are finding it difficult or uninteresting, consider trying a new approach, and know that no matter how tough the process is, soon you’ll be speaking confidently.

There’s another post on this website about Siena’s learning Italian at a residential language school as a teenager. You can find that here. What is your experience with language learning? Let us know and don’t forget to share this post with your friends, using the buttons below!