THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE-LEARNING GENE?

-


"How many languages does he speak?", she gushes, admiringly, as if this were a matter of the Foreign Language Fairy Godmother waving her magic wand and intoning, in her own inscrutable language, "bibbity, bobbity, boo!"

The true answer: "he speaks a number of them, none very correctly, but nobody seems to mind, especially not here in Italy."

I am going to stick my neck out and say something outrageous like, "some people have the foreign language-learning gene, while others do not." Now that could be high sacrilege, coming as it does from a French prof. who has been reinventing herself as an Italian. But I am not suggesting that to be missing that gene condemns anyone to befuddlement. That is entirely up to the would-be speaker.

The foreign-language gene can only get you so far. To speak a new language takes a willingness to risk making mistakes and the energy and discipline to observe and mimic native speakers, to read and watch even the dumbest of programs in the target language, and to talk to yourself in the new language, as you go about your daily activities. 

It is also important to "get over yourself" and not think about what a particular successful (or failed) interaction in the new language says about YOU. Trust me, nobody really cares. Here in the Italian countryside, where people just want to communicate, the priority is to make an effort to get your message across, however inelegantly. 

It is fun to observe my linguistically confident son get repeatedly complimented on his fluent-but-imperfect Italian. With his musical ear, he has a great accent, but little interest in the fine points of grammar. Now this, rather than being an Achilles heel, is part of his success. He does not worry about that stuff, and any mistakes he makes pale in the face of his charm and confidence.

I have the foreign-language gene plus a passion for grammar (my favorite toilet-side reading?:“The BIG Green Book of Italian Verbs), but I am missing the techno-gene;however, I do not really gaze, with envy, at those who have it. I just bumble along getting into terrible techno-doodoo the origin of which no one can fathom, and hope that a technically adept person will get me out of the jam. Life is short, and I am going to leave this arena to them. 

Does that mean that after all, I have more in common with those who ask, "wow, how many languages do you speak?" than I would like to admit?

I don't think so, but I am willing to think about it. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IF YOU MUST HAVE A SMALL MISADVENTURE, MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE IT IN ITALY?

-
Image
We try to steer clear of the mal'occhio (the "evil eye" that causes bad things to happen). But the same week of our little bumper mishap, a close friend told us about his own "contretemps." That's a fancy French word for problems that can arise when one is entering a parking lot at the same time when someone is exiting, but when one of you has the sun in his eyes.  One might say to oneself, as he did, "All I can really see right now is "niente," but what are the chances that anyone would approach during the second it will take me to cross this threshold? Well, because our local Lidl grocery store is very popular at that hour, a quasi-invisible someone could indeed be close enough for anyone entering the lot to scrape two of her car doors.  There was a witless eye-witness to this event. To clarify--the door-scraper's wife who had been following behind in another car and also had the sun in her eyes did not yet realize tha...
Read more

HOW HITTING YOUR BUMPER WHILE BACKING UP INTO JUST ONE IVY-COVERED STONE WALL CAN PUT A DAMPER ON YOUR DAY

-
Image
OOPS! Ivy-covered walls in the Italian countryside are picturesque, but not always as innocent as they look. We thought it would be a good idea to hop into our 1999 Renault to take it for a spin. After all, the poor thing had been sitting there for far too long exercising its primary function as a fruit dryer. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that the windshield of this proud French vehicle is the linchpin of our efforts to manage all the fruit we produce. The method goes like this: put the fruit of the moment in a foil-covered IKEA roasting pan on a sunny Umbrian day, and you're good to go. Or rather, you will be going nowhere for a while, while that fruit caramelizes nicely.  The red-lit "STOP OR THIS VEHICLE WILL EXPLODE!" did not deter my optimistic husband in the least. "This car is so old that it often says alarming stuff like that, but doesn't really mean it." But I was not convinc...
Read more

ON BEING A PRINCIPESSA (OR IMAGINING THAT YOU ARE)

-
Image
Looks like paradise and a great place to have to oneself for a few weeks, no? Well, it pretty much is. But only by day. The other night I went down to turn off the light in the kitchen only to find that it had been taken over by flying and crawling aliens. They were everywhere, and I had to jump out of my delicious torpor and into a killing frenzy. Last year’s invasion of the flying ants had resumed! They had made an initial appearance the other day, but I had taken what I thought were definitive extreme measures to reclaim my turf. (Just goes to show that the Ancient Greeks did not have a monopoly on hubris.) I had removed all temptations from the counter and ferreted them out of the most unexpected places. I think the other members of the family might be surprised to know that they are not the only ones in the house to love coffee. The biggest swarm of them was on top of and under the machine. But there were some tea-totalers, too, who had decided to set up residence in the...
Read more