Learning Italian has been on my agenda for a loooong time.

It’s sort of natural to be drawn to things that are part of your heritage, I guess. (And, uh, at the risk of sounding like a ridiculous literary nerd, I would reeeeally like to read The Divine Comedy in its original language).

One of the colleges nearby me started offering Italian as an online credit course.

Well.

I did a little research about language learning (wanted to study linguistics for awhile) and came to find out that classes are considered a pretty ineffective way to learn a language. (Doesn’t everybody know someone who took language classes all through high school and can’t remember a single thing about it?)

Considering that this class was going to cost me money (a substance that I am sadly not made of), I had to think about it. I took a year of Spanish in college already, but my boyfriend at the time was from El Salvador and those two classes were pretty much THE easiest school-related thing I’ve done in my life.

Long story short, I signed up for it. And since finding an Italian boyfriend is pretty much out of the question, I think I’m just out of luck.

Language-learning works best by immersion, they say.

I can testify to that, I think, because I tried to teach myself Italian through that method awhile back (listening to Italian radio, watching movies with Italian subtitles, listening to Italian audiobooks) and I picked up quite a bit of it. (LingQ is what I was using. If you have an interest in language, check it out.)

Okay, well…I learned more doing THAT than I have in the monotonous vocabulary exercises that this class demands. It’s a lot of work (read: a lot of BUSY work), without much reward.

But I’m going to keep at it. Because as always, it’s possible I’m just being pessimistic. =\ 7 months ago

I want to be able to dream in Italian. 11 months ago

I spent 4 month in Milano as my semester abroad and I’ve fallen in love with this language! I understand most of it now and can speak about every-day stuff.
I’m not going to take an Italian course, because I have no free time and extra money for it. So, my plan is to communicate with the native speakers (people I met in Milano and also there are several italians coming for exchange semester to my school) and watching Euronews in italian regularly. Some grammar exercises would be good too, I guess.
Hope it won’t stay only as New Year resolution! 16 months ago

Fluency in a foreign language is a life-long project so I’m afraid that when it comes to pressing the “I’m done” button here on the 43things site, it’ll take years.

However, I’m quite pleased with myself because I have climbed over a big obstacle, something i was afraid of for some time.
I have used Italian to do a tourist tour in my home city where I usually work as an English language guide.

This is so significant because usually when speaking in Italian, I’m always the passive one – the native speakers speak, I listen and when they turn to me I get to answer. This time I was the active part, I was giving a monologue or even a sort of a lecture.

There is still a lot to improve when it comes to my language skills, but the tourists left happy and they did understand me all throughout the 3-hour tour.

Yay! 21 months ago

After a semester in Italian masterpieces I understand the language pretty well and I could probably defend myself in it but I’ve came to the conclusion that I no longer want to be fluent in Italian.. 2 years ago