By JOHN HENDERSON
By JOHN HENDERSON
@JohnHendeRome
johnhenrome@gmail.com
A Letter from Rome: Learning Italian not as easy as uno, due, tre.
Sometime during my first month in Rome, I ventured into my local public market near the Vatican. It’s a necessary daily trek here. All food in Rome is fresh. Thus, all food in Rome lasts all of about 48 hours. I know American food is packed with preservatives and wanted to know the freshness of my local produce. So I walked up to a vegetable stand — slowly, as I mentally reviewed my rudimentary Italian. I approached the old, wrinkled woman in the bandana standing behind the bell peppers and zucchini.
I said, “Scusa, hai pomodori hanno preservativi?” (Do your tomatoes have preservatives?)
She started laughing, loudly. So did the man in the fruit stand next to her. In reality, I didn’t ask if her tomatoes had preservatives. “Preservativi” is the Italian word for … “CONDOMS!”
If my Italian was better, I would’ve countered the laughter with, “Well, um, if they did, you could have sex with a tomato and be safe.” Unfortunately, my Italian wasn’t even at the stage where I could figure out the proper change when I did buy tomatoes which, by the way, have noconservanti (preservatives).
Ever since I retired from The Denver Post in January 2014 and moved to Rome, people have asked me what’s the hardest part about living here. It’s not the bureaucracy. It’s not the lack of public services. It’s certainly not missing college football. (Have you seen my Oregon Ducks lately?)
It’s language. And nothing else is even close.
I started learning Italian at 45, an age when you start forgetting where you put your car keys. Try at that age to remember the second person plural conjugation for “dimenticare” (to forget). Learning Italian is without question the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It’s harder than scuba diving inside sunken battle ships, harder than climbing Kilimanjaro, harder than watching Jon Embree’s Colorado football teams play.
Learning Italian in Italy is like being an infant in an all-adult world. You start by understanding nothing, having no visible means of communication. Then you start comprehending basic concepts. Slowly you begin to speak. People around you laugh occasionally and you cry occasionally, but eventually you learn to communicate.
After more than 2 ½ years in Rome — four if you count a 16-month stint from 2001-03 — I am still not fluent. I am conversational. If you scoff at that last statement, ask yourself if you know a foreign language. If you don’t, then please take the Eiffel Tower to your next colonoscopy.
FAI ZITTO! (SHUT UP!) You have no idea how hard it is.
Learning to speak Italian in Italy is more important than speaking the local language in any other country in Western Europe. Many Italians speak a few words of English. Some are conversational. Very few are fluent. Get outside the tourist centers, hardly anyone speaks English. While shopping, I had to learn Italian or starve.
Learning Italian in Rome is even harder. It’s the only city I’ve visited that has four languages: Italian, the modern version that didn’t become the official national language until unification in 1861; Romanesco, the old dialect still spoken by old people, such as those hanging out in my local piazza; Roman, the current dialect which sounds like they’re eating their words, chopping off all the last vowels; Romanaccio, the vulgar side of Roman and very useful when impressing locals during soccer arguments.
Also, Romans talk really fast. It’s said the Tuscans speak the purest form of Italian. They all sound like graduates of the Columbia School of Broadcasting. Romans sound like cab drivers honking their way through a traffic jam. Learning Italian in Rome is like an Italian learning English in Queens. It can be done but the learning curve is lower.
I’ve heard numerous bubble-headed Americans ask, “Why don’t more Italians speak English?” I tell them, “Well, Italians live in Italy. They speak Italian in Italy.” There is a less cynical explanation.
Nothing here is in English.
Nothing. All TV is in Italian. All American movies are dubbed in Italian. There is no English-language magazine. The only English-language newspaper is The International New York Times, and no Italian is dumb enough to shell out 3.20 euros for 18 measly pages of Grand Prix and Paris fashion news. Italians of my generation had a choice in school of three years of a foreign language. But many who took English forgot all of it from a complete lack of practice and were taught by Italians who weren’t necessarily fluent themselves. Italy is a big, self-sufficient country. English here is not necessary. This isn’t Holland.
My learning curve looks very much like a topography map of Nebraska. It took a long time to reach a hilltop. I started in 2001 with group lessons in a little Italian tourism office in Lakewood where our Genovese instructor taught us the difference between “grazie” and “gracias.” He also could not convince one man that it is not pronounced, “EYE-talian.”
When I moved to Rome, I took two months of intense courses four to five hours a day. I could not have felt more humiliated if I tried addressing Parliament. In my classes were Europeans in their 20s working on their fifth language. One Swede went from scratch to fluency in three months. Then there were the Spanish and Latin Americans. For them to learn Italian is like me learning a British accent. They could learn Italian on their lunch hour. Meanwhile, I became so frustrated with my lack of progress, I once walked into a pizzeria with my then-American girlfriend and ordered in English.
I don’t order in English in Norway.
Burned out, angry and a little self-destructive, I left the language school and hired a private tutor. The Italian grammar they mind-numbingly tried teaching me in a language I didn’t understand suddenly made sense when explained in English. I was no longer the worst in the class. I was the only one in the class. She took me around her Trastevere neighborhood, the old artists and hippy quarters from the 1960s, and had me run simple fake errands in Italian. I started building confidence. I started seeing hope. I started to converse.
Then I began a learning mechanism I have continued to this day. Scambios are language exchanges in which you meet an Italian who wants to learn English. You speak English for an hour and Italian for an hour. You correct each other along the way. It’s free. It’s easy. You talk about subjects you enjoy. You meet in cool bars and cafes all over Rome. And, occasionally, you make a good friend.
Sometimes, partners want to be too good of a friend. Take the Italian man who posted an advertisement on our language school wall. It said, roughly, “Italian man, 40, wants to improve his English with a native English speaker. Only women need to respond. Signed, Pietro.”
I have had more than 100 scambio partners. Old. Young. Male. Female. Some I discuss soccer, some travel, some relationships, some food and wine. The key is finding a subject that interests you. In language school, I didn’t give a damn how Alessandro found directions to the bus stop.
However, you must be careful asking for a scambio. Technically, in Italian the word “scambio” indicates sex swapping. I once tried changing it to “”scambio di lingua” but the word lingua not only means “language” but also “tongue.” That, obviously, made it worse.
Scambios have been very helpful over the years but they’re also the source of my most embarrassing moment. I was meeting a beautiful, raven-haired goddess in the romantic wine bar, Del Frate, near the Vatican. It was the kind of romantic setting where you could fall in love with a mannequin and this woman looked like a young Sophia Loren. We were talking Italian and were discussing my life as a sportswriter. She asked if I played sports when I was younger. I tried to say I was a lousy athlete. But I screwed up the noun and the tense and instead of saying I was a lousy athlete, I said, “I’m lousy in bed.”
“Athlete” is “atleta;” “bed” is “letto.” Atleta. Letto. It’s an easy mistake to make, one I didn’t know I made. I could not understand why this woman was laughing so hard just because I hit only .236 my senior year in high school. And to answer your next question, no, I didn’t get to prove to her otherwise.
Then again there was the time a female scambio partner was feeling down. I tried telling her that she always seems happy, or Sembri molto felice. However, instead I said, “Sembri molto facile.” Facile means “easy.” Oops!
After 2 ½ years living alone in a neighborhood where Romanaccio is the language of choice, I can pretty much say what I want. I can speak it, read it and write if efficiently, with the expected number of mistakes. However, my American accent remains brutal. My Italian sounds German. I tell my girlfriend, “I love you” and it sounds as if I’m giving her orders to invade Poland.
My comprehension also lags behind. TV news may as well be read in medieval Bulgarian. Guided tours about Etruscan burial sites are wastes of time. I once went to a 2 ½-hour play and didn’t understand a single sentence. But I can understand my Italian friends, some of whom can’t count to three in English. I can understand some dumb movies which I sometimes watch with Italian subtitles. I understand soccer telecasts, even player interviews with some of the dimmer bulbs on the roster.
My girlfriend, Marina, speaks just enough English to travel and translate problem words for me. We speak about 95 percent Italian — or when she gets tired of practicing English after 30 minutes. She’s a Roman for Romans, meaning she’s a third-generation Roman with a heavy Roman accent. However, I have discovered it’s a boon to a relationship when a man doesn’t understand half of what a woman is telling him.
Besides a great way to fend off Alzheimer’s, learning Italian is my daily challenge. Every day I walk out the door it’s a new adventure. Most Americans have no comprehension of what it’s like to live in a foreign world where you’re learning as if you were an infant. Unfortunately, at my age, you absorb weight much easier than words.
I have patience. I’m in Rome forever. It’s a beautiful country with beautiful people who speak a beautiful language. I am slowly blending into the fabric of the culture. But one thing is certain.
It ain’t facile.
-30-
(John Henderson has been a brilliant sports and travel writer for most of his adult life, although some would claim he never has become an adult. On Jan. 10, 2014, he retired after 23 years at The Denver Post and moved back to Rome where he lived from 2001-03 as a freelance travel writer. During his Rome stint he also wrote a light-hearted book about starting a new life in a new country — with a long-distance girlfriend — called “American Gladiator in Rome: Finding the Eternal Truth in the Infernal City.” Currently John writes a travel blog called Dog-Eared Passport (www.johnhendersontravel.com) that chronicles his life in Rome, and his travels around the world. In 2003, he was last seen in Rome kicking and screaming as The Denver Post dragged him back to the paper he first joined in 1990. In his second stint in Denver, however, he says he had some of the best 10 years of his career. He covered national college football, six Tours de France, swimming and soccer in the Summer Olympics and figure skating in the Winter Olympics. Don’t laugh. Figure skating got him to Russia three times. He also wrote a traveling food column called “”A Moveable Feast” based on John eating everything from caviar in Russia to fried insects in Cambodia. The insects are still preferable to the bacon cheeseburger at the Hooters in Tuscaloosa, Ala.) he covered the Colorado Buffaloes from 1990-95, the Denver Broncos from 1995-97, the Colorado Rockies in 1997 and Major League Baseball from 1998-2001. Henderson worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal from 1980-90 and the mercifully defunct Fournier Newspapers in suburban Seattle from 1979-80. he is a proud 1978 graduate of the University of Oregon, which was just one mile from where he grew up in Eugene.)