So I’ve recently realized that in all of my blogging about my cool trips I have neglected to keep the blog updated on events in my everyday life. So first of all let’s talk about my language interaction situation. I am involved in two little arrangements here in Sesto that deal with language. The first is my language partner and the second is weekly tutoring at a local elementary school. My language partner is basically a local Italian who I’m supposed to meet up with weekly so that we can have discussions in Italian and English to help each other learn our respective languages. Her name is Daniela and a girl named Sarah and I meet with her every Tuesday.
So the week before Fall Break on October 17th I met with my Italian Language partner for the first time. Sarah and I met with her in the lobby of the Villa and then we hopped in her car and she took us to her apartment where we met her husband. There we sat down and began to chat.
We learned that she was a teacher and that she has two daughters who are 4 and 5. Her husband works for General Electric so his English is a bit better and he occasionally helped out with translation. I’d say that I am about the same level of Italian as Daniela is for English so it usually works pretty well as far as understanding. Sarah however, is taking her first semester of Italian and therefore isn’t quite up to our level. Basically that just means I do a little bit more of the talking, but it’s still a good arrangement because we’re all getting the practice we need.
When we first got together we had a few awkward minutes of confusion where we all jumped from language to language. I’d ask something in Italian, Daniela would respond in English, I’d respond in English, then she’d struggle for a word in Italian. After we sat down I kinda took charge and declared that we would start in English and then switch. So that’s what we did. When we were using Italian I talked mostly and occasionally handed it over to her to contribute. I talked about the places I’d been and things like that. Then we switched to Italian and Daniela spoke in response to our questions.
Whenever one of us struggles for a word or grammar the other person waits and lets them try to find it and then corrects or fills in blanks when necessary. There are occasional moments when we can’t figure out what something means I remember Daniela having trouble with the words “waterfall” and “cute” and Sarah and I had to explain them. I remember having a terrible time coming up with a way to say ‘sensationalized by the media’ in Italian and eventually had to give up and move on. I also remember that when I made an off-hand comment about getting lost on the way there it took 5 minutes to make Daniela understand. While we’re about equal as far as speaking I think I’m a little bit better at understanding than Daniela is, so I end up doing a lot of explaining in English and occasionally trying to translate my explanation in Italian.
The whole thing is a really funny experience. You have to make heavy use of synonyms when trying to describe things, and you have to sometimes really stretch your brain to define words you’ve always taken for granted. It makes you oddly self-conscious of the way you speak and the English language in general. I dumb down the language and vocabulary I’m using a lot and since Daniela has some difficulty understanding I have to speak slowly and enunciate a lot. You realize different the languages are. To me for example English is a very unorganized and clumsy yet more creative language. There is about a million different ways to say everything, which makes it more creative, but the arrangement of words is completely arbitrary half the time. Then you realize how many silly idiomatic phrases and words there are like ‘turtleneck’. There are also words like ‘get’ that we just throw into verb phrases with meaning that changes all over the place.
The next time we met, after fall break, we mostly talked about our breaks and what we did. More recently we’ve been moving away from descriptions of what we did (the easiest thing to speak about) and we have started talking about more interesting things. Now when we speak English I usually describe a movie or book in detail, which leads to a lot of interesting vocabulary lessons like ‘dystopic’, ‘fight to the death’, ‘dinosaurs’, etc. It was an interesting day when I tried to describe “Tree of Life” which has some crazy stuff going on. When we speak Italian we tend to describe American customs like Halloween and other holidays or compare the differences between Italian and American culture of things like marriage and engagement. Now that the conversations have gotten a little less concrete the conversation has become more difficult so the whole thing definitely has challenged me to use the language in more ways.
A couple weeks after I started these meetings Daniela asked me to come in to her class once a week to help the kids with their English lesson. So around the first week of November I started going to the class. She teaches third graders and they are all very loud and all over the place.
The first day I walked in and we basically had 15 minutes where they asked me every question they could. They started with ‘what’s your name?’ and then I told them and they all told me theirs. Then we did the same for ages. Then they started asking me my favorite (fill in the blank). I told them my favorite color, number, shirt, toy, book and film. After the last two they now know me as the Harry Potter guy and there is this one kid who takes advantage of any relevant question to shout out “Harry Potter!”. After that I described to them a story in English and then we took turns acting out the dialogue. First I did it with a student and then I helped them do it in pairs. After that they had some riddles prepared for me and I had to guess what animals they were describing.
The next week I helped them learn to describe several more animals and had them all read each sentence I wrote. The general form is this:
I have four legs.
I have a long neck.
I am yellow and brown.
I can run and walk.
Who am I?
The answer is, of course, giraffe. It’s funny to listen to the kids try to speak English. Some are pretty good and speak normally. Some speak in very broken up words. A lot of them pronounce ‘I’ like ‘hi’. They all had trouble with the word ‘live’.
The next time I went I described another story to them. It was about a wizard with magical school supplies (resulting in some HP jokes cracked from the kid in the corner). So after teaching them school supply terms I described the story. It ended up being really difficult because the Daniela stepped out so I had to try to describe a ruler becoming a bridge and a riddle with 3 doors that were labeled with the number 3. It’s pretty fun overall and I enjoy doing it.
Yup so every Tuesday I get to do both of those things. They are one of the main sources of my interaction with Italians, so I really like that I’m doing them.
