Language Immersion Makes Me Go ":("

I thought that I had overbooked myself this Saturday night, and yet, here I am. Ah, blogging.

I wrote a post while I was feeling sorry for myself, and I did a lot of whining. I won’t trouble you all with that nonsense. I want to say this: to all the non-native English speakers whom I’ve judged for not picking the right words, or for mispronounciations, or for having trouble understanding me, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’m very humbled to be in your place now. I’ve come to the realization that foreign students are badly mistreated in American schools, especially middle schools.

As you can all guess, I am still frustrated with myself and my speaking, on a daily basis. With the other BCSP students and the directors, my speaking is great and I jabber on and on in Italian. I roll my R’s. I use pronouns. I conjugate correctly. I even occasionally use the subjunctive. And then suddenly, around native speakers, I clam up and say nothing—or else I think it correctly in my head only to butcher it on the way out of my mouth. But mostly I just clam up. I get afraid to say or do anything--especially when it's obvious that I'm the anchor that everyone else has to work around. It feels a bit like I’ve regressed to my middle-school-age self, too shy to say more than a few words at a time. I’ve missed a lot of opportunities.

The program director asked the BCSP students if we’d be interested in tutoring Università di Bologna students in English for the TOEFL exam, and I submitted my e-mail address to say that I was interested; maybe instead of accepting a fee, I’ll ask them if they wouldn’t mind just sitting and talking with me every so often. Just have to get over this horrible confidence vacuum.

I am trying to work on it. Got to get those chattering skills back! To all the non-stateside people reading this blog—I am usually very talkative, I promise!

My current project is the letter z, which is my favourite letter in Italian because of how beautiful it sounds. Grazie. Piazza. Lezione. Trasportazione. Svizzero. Lazio. Gorgeous! I can’t say it, though, at least not how they say it. Americans say it as a ts sound—pizza = peet-sah—but it’s not quite that, it’s softer and sweeter and it drives me up the wall. I could listen to my professor say popolazione to me all day long (…it’s my new favourite word). 

My friend Ery, a linguistics major, has told me that after a certain age you can’t acquire new linguistic sounds, and sometimes not even perceive them (brings back memories of Mrs. Krish in French class trying to get us to hear the difference between doux and du, which both sound pretty much like “do”). I figure small building blocks (like single letters) are easier to focus on than this yawning chasm of must-perfect-my-speaking.

I am reading Italian books, too, for whatever that’s worth.

Luca has been very good to me and often invites me to go places with his friends. We all went to a karaoke night and I had a great time listening to Italians singing American songs (by the way, a true Italian accent sounds nothing like an Italian American accent—it’s tons funnier). And then Luca’s friend Francesca asked me something about “triesci.”

Gah. What is she saying to me I don’t understand her what do I do.

“Triesci?” she insisted. “No? Come on, I know you’ll like it. Tell her, Luca.” She tried to explain what it meant and I had no idea what she was talking about. I frantically blazed through the possibilities in my head. Cognate? Slang? Was it related to the verb uscire? Yes, I thought, that must be it. Uscire means to go out, and the you-singular form is esci, so triesci, she’s asking me to go with her to do something.

It wasn’t until well after she walked away that I realised she had been saying “trashy;” did I want to sing a trashy song with her.

._.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Next time. Next time.

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Random photos make everything better...? (click for full size)

Piazza Maggiore is huge. Those teensy black dots that you can barely see are pigeons.

A lovely ceiling. I'm sorry that it looks all wonky--my camera lens is weird.

Admit that this is the coolest bookshelf you ever saw.

A house on portico-stilts.

A pretty sweet lamp. And I really like how the photo turned out.

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As a post-script: Luca noted that I have not yet issued a formal apology to lasagne (that would be lasagna). I had never really made my peace with the American version, which is heavy and cheesy and oozing with detestable ricotta cheese—really the only Italian dish that I actively disliked. Having eaten it for the first time from the kitchen of a real, live Italian mother, I would like to humbly confess to you all that I am a changed woman. Except for the part about ricotta—I was totally right about that. Luca’s mother got this shocked look on her face when I described that part and said only, “We don’t…make it with ricotta, here.”

I knew it! I knew the ricotta was gross!