Learning Another Language When You Can't Remember Your Own Phone Number

It ain't gonna happen through osmosis, honey

Photo by Element5Digital.

Before visiting Italy on a writers’ retreat in 2012, I pecked around the Interwebz for an article explaining how easy—or difficult—learning the language might be for a person who barely remembered her high school French. Unfortunately, that search led nowhere, and all I got for my trouble were thousands of sidebar ads hawking Duolingo.

When I showed up in Fiumicino Airport in Rome, I couldn’t read a damn thing—including the bathroom signs. I wound up in the wrong one, and you can imagine the look on everyone’s face when I came cluelessly waltzing out of a stall. I couldn’t read the big McDonald’s billboard, and in one of my finer moments at the retreat, I tried asking the kitchen ladies for some honey, but couldn’t muster the word for it (miele) and stood in the doorway flapping my arms and going “bzzzz bzzzz.”

What they should have done was hit me over the head with a broom.

Most Italians don’t speak English. NOR SHOULD THEY. While it’s true that English, the language of expansion, is an entrée to a bigger world, it’s clearly on me to learn the language of my adoptive country.

What a pity then that I’ve found it so incredibly daunting.

Photo by Eliott Reyna

If I had six grand lying around, I would send myself to one of those glorious full-immersion places where you are forced to communicate in Italian for everything; if not, you go hungry and never get a clean towel. Six weeks in a place like that, and you can bet my Italian would progress beyond the halting, mumbling mess I make of it now. Being a novelist who writes in English, I’m not doing myself any favors either, trust me. My brain is a non-porous substance after a day spent wrassling words in my own language. Trying to shove some Italian in there, too, is like squeezing toothpaste through a wall.

I do okay speaking rudimentary Italian, but once Italians start talking to me, very very fast and sometimes in Roman dialect, which purposely elides entire syllables, I can feel the panic rise. It’s all deer: headlights. If John isn’t there to run interference, I get sweaty.

Here in Italy, my love of and facility with my mother tongue is the thing that’s killing me. I get frustrated when I can’t conduct “Level 20” conversations in Italian the way I can in English. Apparently, women are particularly guilty of not wanting to communicate in a foreign language unless they speak it fluently, whereas men are typically less afraid of butchering the tongue of Dante. I’ve gotten over some of that reticence, but I have a long ways to go before I’m as conversant as my boyfriend John.

John speaks perfect Italian. He also speaks French. When we were vacationing in the South of France, he was speaking to our Italian landlady and her French husband in both languages, sometimes in the same sentence.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Photo by Sigmund.

The first myth I’d like to dispel about learning a foreign language is this idea that you’ll just “pick it up” after a few months. You won’t. Maybe if you’re eight and go to Italian elementary school. But as an adult, you’re going to have to study, and if you’re a poor adult, you’re going to have to study on your own, which makes it a lot slower and more frustrating.

Here then are some of the ways I’ve managed to cobble together my woefully inadequate Italian. I’m rating them from least to most effective. Keep in mind, this is only my experience. Your experience may vary. So please don’t @ me.

Duolingo. It’s a ton of fun, but as a way to actually learn Italian? No. I did the entire “tree”—twice, in fact—getting 95% of the answers right, but none of it stuck. I’m a visual-kinesthetic learner, which means I need to see it and write it if I want to remember it. So, as brilliant as it is as an app, it’s more of a game than an educational resource.

Rosetta Stone. A good introduction to a foreign language, sure. But Rosetta Stone will only take you so far. I actually did better with the twelve “Learn to Speak Italian” CDs that I picked up when I was still stateside. If you’re spending half your life on the freeway anyway, why not drill yourself on Italian? Repetition is the key. I listened to each CD until I just couldn’t listen anymore without my ears bleeding. But I did remember what I’d learned, and was able to apply it once I got here.

Fluent Forever. The brainchild of self-taught polyglot Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever does a bang-up job of getting you to remember individual words. It’s also very good at ear training, which enables you to pick up the beautiful subtleties of Italian, say, so you don’t sound like you’re doing a bad impression of an Italian waiter. But Fluent Forever can’t talk back to you, and trust me when I say you’re going to need that. You can go inside a restaurant and ask where’s the bathroom as many times as you want, but what happens if somebody answers and you don’t understand? You’re going to be wandering around looking as dumb as I did in the men’s room at the airport.

Italian Lessons. These I strongly urge you to take before coming to Italy for an extended period. Hearing other people mangle the language will make you feel less self-conscious about your own hideous accent. You can ask questions. You speak and are spoken to. It’s the closest thing to full immersion you’re going to get. I encourage you to supplement those lessons by engaging a private tutor (if you can afford one) or watching Italian movies with English subtitles if you can’t. I like to watch Italian news, especially since the broadcast journos speak textbook Italian.

Photo by Emily Levine.

What amuses me greatly about Italian is how long it takes to say things. English gets straight to the point. What takes five syllables to ask in English often takes twenty syllables to say in Italian. There have been some fascinating studies done on people who effortlessly speak multiple languages. Most of them are gay, left-handed men who are sometimes on the autism scale. Our new Secretary of Transportation, famed polyglot Pete Buttegieg, is both left-handed and gay, so maybe there’s something to that theory.

Unlike the French, Italians are patient with my clumsy attempts to speak the language. I am so grateful. I’ve been to Paris with my high school French, and they glare at you just for having the temerity to speak it. There was this whole thing once with a perfume lady on the Champs Élysée that ended when I stormed out of the shop and extended my stiff middle finger at her.

So, dive in and don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Mess it all kinds of up. Dante won’t spin in his grave, and you will be that much closer to being able to sit at an outdoor café, smoke a cigarette, and talk about the best place to buy hand-cut prosciutto.

Do you have any preferred methods for learning a foreign language? If so, leave them in the comments below.