Non parlo italiano

 I'm about a month into my Italian study. I've tinkered with several languages over the years, but never mastered any of them. In high school I took two years of Latin, a year of Spanish, and a year of French, which I think gives you a sense of how little interest my parents had in parenting. Any locked-in parent would have pointed out that it would have made more sense to take four years of the same language, but I guess it never popped up on their radar. At Franklin, during my undergraduate days, we weren't required to take a foreign language, for some godforsaken reason - and I apparently didn't have the foresight or energy or sense to sign up for some. In graduate school my two languages, inexplicably, were French and Russian, and now, forty years later, I can't speak a word of either. In the decades since then I've tinkered with Arabic for a bit, and over the last couple years Portuguese. However, as much as I love Portugal, it didn't make much sense to keep working on it while Janet was pursuing this (allegedly) shorter route to citizenship. When/if she gets citizenship, I'll have a spousal visa (the ultimate plus one), but will eventually have to pass an Italian exam to get my own citizenship. Even if Janet gets citizenship this summer, I'd still have to live in the country for a couple of years before I would qualify for my own citizenship. However, I'm diving in seriously, knowing that I'll never actually be fluent, but maybe I'll be at least functionally non-embarrassing. I finally got serious and signed up for a class - and will do something more face to face when we're actually in-country. I try to remind myself to be patient, and also that learning a foreign language is one of the best thins that you can do to keep an aged brain lubricated.

I knock off the daily lessons, which I'm really enjoying and I feel that I'm learning a lot more than I ever did on my own, although after being on the road for a week and a half I'm a little behind. Then, after a few days, I go back and work my way through the lessons a second time, and that's when I take notes. I'm trying not to break up the flow the first time through, and just let it flow more naturally, but then come back later and try to get it down. I don't know if it will help, but it seems to make sense at the moment. The biggest problem is that I just suck so hard at languages, but knowing that you're going to live overseas does give you more of a boost in studying. We don't want to be those expats who separate themselves into little clusters of other expats. Instead, we truly want to immerse ourselves.