Prima volta in barca a vela..
Last weekend my boss took us sailing, a little voyage out to the islands. We saw some lovely parts of Vulcano and Lipari that you can’t reach without your own boat. The swaying, even on calm waters, made me feel a little wobbly on the inside but fortunately I wasn’t called upon to assist with the pulling of ropes or tying of knots.
Any potential sailors/students of Italian or English should check out those facebook groups…
Source: Flickr / alison-louise
Perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that learning Arabic or Chinese is going to be more of a challenge than French or Spanish for the native English speaker…
Via: Voxy Blog
…but 23 weeks? That is not far off the time I have been here now, and despite my best efforts, I am very far from language proficiency. To be fair, I have quite a lot less than 25 hours a week to dedicate to language learning, and none of those hours take place in a classroom.
The hardest thing, unsurprisingly, is speaking. I can manage familliar, tourist-type situations well enough. I can understand a lot of other people’s conversations. They are always other people’s conversations though, because participating myself is still beyond my reach.
The problem is, as ever, that I don’t like being bad at things. I’d rather sit quietly and listen than demonstrate my incompetance. It’s not a good excuse, but it is a sad fact. What to do?
Landing at Madrid airport on Christmas Eve, and relief was in the air. I might not have made it home in time for the festivities quite yet, but I was at least back in Europe. Like most european transport terminals, in Madrid airport there are signs and notices and information is available. On the screens, where in Colombia there are advertisements for things I do not want or need interspersed with videos of Shakira singing incomprehensibly about ‘Africa’, in Madrid airport there are listings of arrivals and departures, advice on transfers between terminals and where to claim your baggage.
The other good thing about Madrid is that it’s only an hour or two from London. Getting home from there is no problem, even on Christmas Eve.
It might be a little further away than Madrid, but I am enjoying Sicily. The pace of life is civilised here. There is no rushing, no traffic jams, no pre-dawn starts to the day, and so far, I have not even seen a bus. Another major improvement is the weather: When it rains, it is rain like we know it, it falls for a while and then stops. It doesn’t flood streets, ruin shoes and drown small mammals.
Looking east/west…. the sea is on both sides!
People are rightfully proud of their food. It is local, seasonal, fresh and delicious, and often straight out the sea. It is not a questionable hamburger with a packet of crisps crumbled on top, stuck on with a selection of sauces and topped with plastic cheese.
orange on the outside, red on the inside..
I’ll be here until June at least. These are some things I hope to do between now and then: Be a better photographer. Finish an ambitious crochet project.
bigger than these..
Learn to cook Sicilian food. But most importantly, be able to speak Italian.
I have felt for a while now that there is something not quite right about teaching English for a living and not being able to speak anything else. I find myself in this state not for lack of trying, but whilst reading books, making notes and learning vocabulary are all good things they do not add up to speaking a language.
I tell my students all the time it’s more important to communicate than to be perfect, and that no-one gets to be perfect without making mistakes. Unfortunately, I have never much liked being bad at things and I tend to avoid public displays of any kind until I am sure I have mastered the skill in question.
I attribute this tendancy to an experience in my formative years. I must have been about nine or ten and I had been learning the violin at school for a few years. I certainly never claimed to be a proficient violinist, although I had probably got ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ under my belt by this point. Not content with having paying parents listen to this stuff in their own homes, the music school organised ‘concerts’ each term. On one memorable occasion, our class of about ten other kids and me scratched and squeaked our way through the opening bars of the piece horrendously enough to warrant our teacher shouting over us until we stopped causing damage to people’s eardrums.
Whilst this is a valuable lesson to apply to musical performances, it doesn’t work so well for languages. It’s probably too much to hope for to be a fluent speaker of anything in six months, but being able to communicate in a slow and wobbly fashion might be possible. Updates on my progress to follow…
