Buon giorno, signore! Come va?

As mentioned last week, in just over seven weeks, I'll be heading for Italy.  This will be my ninth visit to that country, beginning with a six-month period of living and studying in Italy as a college student.

I must speak Italian pretty well by now, right?

Ha!

I am the worst person I know at learning spoken languages.  I took two years of Spanish in high school, and another five terms in college.  I became reasonably adept -- temporarily -- at reading simple Spanish.  But my speaking and listening ability, despite college language labs in college, designed to give us an "ear" for the language, remained rudimentary.  "Buenos dias.  ¿Como está usted?"  That pretty much sums up my conversational Spanish.

As part of my student days in Italy, I also took three terms of "Intensive Italian," focusing on the spoken, rather than written, language,  One of my female classmates was kind enough to tell me that my spoken Italian was "laughable."   Laughable or not, I am a bit more fluent in Italian than in Spanish, because I've visited the country so frequently.

Spanish and Italian are similar languages -- more similar when spoken than in writing.  This similarity helped me at first to master an elementary Italian vocabulary, but it also meant that I now forget whether the word that comes to mind when I'm trying to make myself understood is the Italian or the Spanish word.  "¡Que lastima!  Or, should I say, "Che peccato!"  

Even at my best, back when I was a student and had command of a very basic vocabulary, my grammar was even less than basic.  Italian has at least eight verb tenses, for example -- present, future, imperfect, perfect, past historic, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive.  In speaking, I confine myself to the present tense; where absolutely necessary, I'll use the perfect tense to indicate a past action, for the simple reason that it's an easy tense to remember. 

"Tomorrow I go to Milan if my sister arrives in time; yesterday I am in Rome," is how I sound."     

Fortunately, the Italians are a very genial people, and very forgiving of mistakes made by struggling foreigners.  The people I'm apt to deal with as a tourist very often speak excellent English -- better than some native English speakers I know back home.  And everyone seems delighted if you know any Italian at all, and that you make any effort at all to speak it.  

And those facts -- together with use of explanatory hand signs -- get me through the day as a tourist.  But "getting through the day" doesn't equate with an ability to engage in good conversation with those Italians who speak no English.  It's hard to discuss anything of complexity when one of the speakers is, as David Sedaris put it somewhere, "speaking baby talk." 

For months, I've been planning to brush up on my Italian before the trip, and now it seems a bit too late.  I'm not proud of myself, but it will all work out.  The human brain has surprising resources, and I've been surprised at the Italian words that have popped into my mouth from the depths of my memory when I desperately needed to convey or obtain information.  

Like, "Per favore!  Dov'è la toilette?"