Bellissimo!
By Carol Driscoll
My friend Maureen and I, both in our late-50s, thought we’d defy statistics pointing to the near impossibility of learning a foreign language in adulthood. The university where we worked offered foreign-language classes to staff and faculty at a significantly reduced rate, which added a financial incentive to our thumb-your-nose-at-all-age-biases stance.
Italian for Beginners was the obvious choice. Maureen and I shared a love of all things Italian and planned a visit to Italy the minute we scraped together enough money for plane fare and a couple weeks of la dolce vita. I had also on numerous occasions read that learning a foreign language was an excellent way for older adults to improve memory and mental agility. Moreover, I was half-Italian. Yet my mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles had all passed away. Perhaps I could resurrect a hint of their spirit through the gorgeous, vowel-rich language of my ancestors. Surely, I thought, the language had to be encoded in my genes along with my tendency to gain weight easily and to sing off-key.
Any fantasies about my genealogical advantage vanished after the first class. Our teacher, named Annunziata but called Tina, was a small, olive-skinned dynamo who spoke fluent English with a delightful accent. We wouldn’t hear much of that accent after the first session, however, as Tina insisted on conducting our no-grade, non-credit, “casual” class almost entirely in Italiano. She also made it clear that she expected us to learn the basics of the language prior to the conclusion of our 12-week course. Which is when I started to learn an auxiliary lesson right alongside the Italian – that sentimental yearnings can turn daunting when explored up close and in rigorous detail.
During the first few classes, when Tina asked us questions in Italian about our lives (our names – mi chiamo Carol); (where we lived – Io abito in Colorado); (where did I work – Io lavoro a l’universita), Maureen and I joined our classmates in shuffling through our textbooks to find the proper ways to frame the answers. Shortly thereafter we both developed the annoying habit of overusing certain words and phrases. “Si, si, si, si,” Maureen would stammer whenever Tina explained something to her, and because I was forever doubtful about what I was saying, I adopted the catch phrase, “Non e vero?” (Isn’t it true?). We both described anything even mildly pleasing as bellissimo! And we bid everyone good day far more than we did in our native tongue.
Most of our classmates were younger than us (some were university students who planned to backpack throughout Europe in the summer) but some were older, retired faculty. One professor had a son who lived in Italy while another was refreshing his skills in a language he’d learned in his youth. Tina began calling classmates named Robert, Roberto, and Elizabeth, Elisabetta, but those of us without directly translatable names at least got to hear the r’s rolled exotically when Tina called on us. Listening to her speak Italian gave us all a model to strive for, if not reach, and I was grateful that my deceased Italian relatives could not actually hear my awkward elocution of their melodic language.
I don’t know about the rest of the class, but Maureen and I masked our difficulties with more than a few tongue-in-cheek pretensions outside the classroom. Whenever we ran into each other on campus, we’d greet each other with a shouted “Ciao bella” and “Come sta?” Then we’d shrug like a couple of aging contessas. We mastered first the broad gesture, the animated expression and hand-theater of the language, assuming that the complex grammatical rules would soon follow. I memorized and for the most part retained the nouns, adjectives, and adverbs on each week’s vocabulary list. But mastering the verbs, which set the entire language in motion, seemed hopeless. The language also used a system of matching verb, modifier, noun, and pronoun endings that proved more confusing than Roman traffic patterns. Learning Italian made me feel young in a way I hadn’t anticipated: I sounded like a five-year-old.
Maureen and I softened the rigors of learning a new language in our dotage by having dinner at an Italian restaurant every few weeks. There, after stuffing ourselves with calamari, bowls of pasta, and baskets of bread, we would decide that perhaps we were a little slow to learn Italian because our minds were already so jam-packed with a lifetime’s worth of rich experience that our brain-space wasn’t quite as vast it had been in our empty-headed youth. “Non e vero?” I would ask. “Si, si, si, si, si,” Maureen would answer, pouring each of us another glass of Chianti.
So we hadn’t distinguished ourselves as linguists; was that going to stop us from visiting a country and speaking a language that we loved? Not a chance. On the contrary, our desire to gain some mastery over the Italian language burned even brighter. We enrolled in Intermediate Italian. Tina would be teaching that course as well, so we wouldn’t have to break in another instructor. More importantly, it seemed careless to waste the workout we’d already given our brains with all that memorization and the high learning curve. Non e vero?
