Sixty-five years ago, in 1961, I began the study of Italian. It was a six-credit "Intensive Italian" course designed to prepare me for my stay in Florence, Italy, as a member of Stanford's overseas study program. I took two more quarters of Intensive Italian in Italy itself.
In those days, unless you were traveling as part of an American Express tour, you really needed some basic Italian just to get around Italy on your own. Now, almost any Italian who has any relationship with tourists speaks passable English. Then, very few did. Even those who knew a foreign language were more apt to know German or French, rather than English. Those Stanford courses were mandatory for everyone in the program, just as were the series of inoculations for a whole panoply of diseases that were apparently rampant in post-War Europe, but diseases for which we pampered Americans were totally unprepared.
I learned to speak the language well enough to ask directions, buy train tickets, order meals, talk to bank clerks. And that was about it. Social chats with local students were pretty much beyond my abilities, although not beyond the abilities of some of my fellow students. As humorist David Sedaris says about his early attempts at French, for the native speaker, trying to talk to him was like chatting to a child who spoke only baby talk.
After I returned home, I tried to refresh and improve my memory of the language a couple of times by taking non-credit refresher courses, but I really hadn't retained much to refresh. The courses didn't help.
And by the time I first returned to Italy, in 1970, Italy no longer felt like an isolated monolingual country. Especially among the younger set, it had been exposed to a massive tourist influx which, together with increased teaching of English in schools, made most Italians with whom I interacted far more fluent in English than I was in what was left of my Italian.
And since 1970, that trend has spread to most of the population, at least in northern Italy, and in all age groups.
But the language is still useful to know. A reading knowledge of Italian, to understand what all the signs say, and to read newspaper headlines. And some speaking and listening ability, just to survive interactions with the occasional Italian who can't (or prefers not to) struggle with English. Just two years ago, just a two or three mile walk from where we were staying on Lake Como, my sister and I stopped at a tiny café and asked for some cappuccino. We encountered the sole person in charge, and he spoke no English. He understood "cappuccino," of course, but we had some other details to discuss, and I found even my very minimal Italian ability quite helpful.
And so, when I returned from Lake Como and ran into an ad for "Duolingo," an on-line language program, offered free of charge, I decided to give its Italian program a try. I was soon hooked.
Duolingo takes you through a number of levels, designated by various precious stones, as your ability increases. Each day you start out with five "hearts," and you lose one heart each time you make an error. When you're out of hearts, you're through for the day.
You are provided with vocabulary as you need it to carry on conversations -- baby talk conversations, it's true -- and examples of the necessary sentence structure. You translate English to Italian, and Italian to English. You are given spoken sentences over your computer's speakers, and required to write them out. Sometimes a paragraph is dictated, and you are asked not to translate word by word, but just to make an educated guess of what was being discussed. You are asked to fill in blanks in a sentence, mainly as a way to force you to intuit the concept of singular/plural adjectives and pronouns, and the need to make adjectives agree in gender and number with the Italian nouns.
What's interesting is that, unlike in high school or college courses, there is never any abstract discussion of agreement in number and gender. You simply pick it up by trial and error. You never are asked to prepare tables conjugating verbs and declining nouns, adjectives and pronouns. You simply learn that "I speak" differs from "we speak" more by the form of the verb than by the pronoun attached (and often omitted). Parlo = I speak. Parliamo = we speak. You learn grammar by repetition, just as a baby learns.
Soon, you become so absorbed in what you're learning (or at least in competing to reach the next jeweled level!}, that "striking out" by losing your last heart and having to wait for the next day to continue becomes unbearable. At that point you learn about paying an annual fee and being given, effectively, an infinite number of hearts. No matter how many mistakes you make, you never "strike out."
Yeah, yeah, I thought. I'm not getting sucked into that. They offered me a two-week free trial, but I refused. I was afraid I'd forget to cancel before the two weeks had expired, and I'd be trapped. The months went by, and the offer was repeated. Ok, I thought, I'll give it a try. I loved it, but not enough to pay for it. They gave a very clear warning that my two free trial was about to expire, and made it very easy to quit. Which I did.
Another month or so later, they generously repeated the offer of a two-week free trial. I was really getting into working my way through one lesson after another, without worrying about my "hearts." The warning came again as the two weeks neared its end. I sighed. I did nothing. My Visa card was billed appropriately.
I've never looked back. It's been worth it.
