Parlo Italiano

I'm still struggling with my Italian.  10 years ago when I was here, I enrolled in an Italian course.  For three weeks, I spent about 3 1/2 hours a day in class, Monday thru Friday learning Italian.  With only 4 other people in class and only common language being Italian, I started feeling pretty comfortable with Italian by the end of the three weeks.  And, spending evening dinners and weekends with the wonderful Maria Grazia also helped with the language.   But, of course when back in the states, I got lazy and ended up losing ground again.  I even took a couple Italian classes at U of M (free to audit courses there when you are over 63 years old).  But without continually using the language, it gets pretty rusty.

I was hopeful that being here full time, I'd get pretty comfortable again with speaking Italian.  Not exactly the case.  During the week, we are pretty much on our own, and our use of Italian tends to be dealing with shop keepers.  It doesn't take much extended conversation when just asking for a few pork chops. And, Karen's job is to speak nothing but English to Ettore for a few hours a day, so not much Italian during that time.   The best times are weekends which tend to involve family dinners.  With a group of about 12 of us, and many different conversations all going at once, you get challenged on your Italian.  Vincenzo is one of the best as he makes a point of trying to speak more slowly and to make himself understandable to us.  Also Alessandro is good and has enough english to help with our understanding.  Of course Elena speaks very good English and assists also.  She is pretty funny as the other day in the midst of political discussions, her husband Giuseppe was going on at length, and she turned to us and said, "he's not even speaking Italian now," as he was pretty much speaking all in Sicilian dialect and was on a roll.  It is very enjoyable and rewarding to attempt to comprehend and respond in Italian,  even if it taxes your brain.  

Conversations cover politics, religion, world events and whatnot.  These are very intelligent people.  I'm lucky if I comprehend about 60% of what's going on.  Last Sunday on the topic of religion, Vincenzo was making the point that while religion and science in the past continually butted heads and were on opposite sides, that now the two seem to be converging whereby they seem to be able to coexist with less conflict. (Not sure I agree with this, especially with the state of affairs in US.)  Somehow this moved to talk of the "God Particle" which I have heard of but haven't a clue what it is.  Stephen Hawking's name got thrown in the mix and I can't begin to tell you where all this went from there.  It lead me to the internet the next day to try and see what this was about.  Obviously as you all know, the God Particle is the Higgs Boson.  As explained on Wikipedia: "In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately."  Glad I looked that up as now it is completely clear to me. And, this is why I ended up in law school, as I have little comprehension of these science things.  I'm sure there are many of you out there that could probably put this in terms that I could understand, but I'm not holding my breath.  

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoy these people and the experience. And, little by little, my Italian is improving.