Ray of light

Today I feel cautiously optimistic about how my Italian language learning is coming along. No major breakthrough has occurred, but I notice that instead of being able to pick out only an occasional word when someone speaks to me in Italian, or when I eavesdrop on people at the next table in the cafe, now I catch two- or three-word phrases that actually mean something--even if the context still eludes me.

At my lesson today with Franca we explored the mysteries of "piacere." In Italian you don't like something; rather, it gives you pleasure. What we regard as the object of our liking is, to the Italians, something that acts on us. So whereas in the U.S. I like prosciutto, here in Italy prosciutto gives pleasure to me--"Prosciutto mi piacere." To me this seems not only grammatically confusing, but slightly indecent.

Afterwards I went to the newsstand by the little park where we meet and browsed the selection of comic books. Long ago a friend advised us that the best way to learn a foreign language was to read comics, because the words were illustrated sentence by sentence. We were trying to learn German at the time so we followed his advice. I suppose it helped, although the only thing I remember actually learning from a comic was the not-very-useful-to-us phrase exclaimed by some masked dog-men who were interrupted as they were trying to rob Scrooge McDuck's safe: "Hau ab--die Boelle!" ("Cheese it--the cops!" is a rough translation.)

None of the Italian comics looked particularly germane to our current circumstances, either, but I chose the two cheapest ones and am looking forward to settling down with them tomorrow. Gratifyingly, I was able to engage the newsstand proprietor in a discussion of how much 2.50 plus 2.90 is and make myself understood, although in the excitement of the moment I got the math wrong.

A further spur to my Italian comprehension, and perhaps my spiritual growth as well, came from a surprisingly eastern direction. My friend Pam is a serious practitioner of Qi Gong, which the Italians pronounce, in their adorable way, "Chee-Gonga." (I exaggerate, but only a little.) Last night she took me along to a practice at a studio in Parma, and tonight we went to another held in a lovely, tree-shaded park here in Fidenza.

Until this trip I was a Qi Gong virgin, so I struggled to imitate Pam's and the instructor's graceful movements while simultaneously making sense of the instructions, which of course were in Italian. This overload seemed to momentarily crack something open in my brain, and I was surprised by how much I found myself understanding.