Il cervello anziani

That means "the aging brain," and I am keenly aware that that's what I'm working with. What has brought this to my attention is my efforts to learn Italian, a project that doesn't seem to be going all that well lately.

Before we returned to Italy I took lessons pretty much twice a week with Nando, my delightful Bay Area Italian teacher. To the right is an example of his handiwork. I wish I could get it tattooed on one of my forearms, for easy reference.

I've also been religiously doing DuoLingo every day (I'm up to a 275-day streak) and reading at least a little Italian every morning. I dip into an Udemy online intermediate Italian course fairly often, too. Plus I'm living in Italy, damn it, surrounded by spoken, written, and hollered Italian! By now I should be practically fluent, right?

Instead, I usually find myself resorting to flinging a few nouns and verbs around, usually of the wrong tense and/or gender, and trying to act out most of what I want to convey. (My impression of someone dying of arugula poisoning, because I can never remember how to say "My husband is allergic to arugula," consistently amuses Italian waiters.) And when someone speaks to me in Italian, which people occasionally try to do, I rarely can understand anything but the first few words. By the time my logey mental computer has figured out the beginning of the first sentence, my interlocutor has hurtled on and I'm left begging, "Scusi, scusi, parla piu lento, per favore." (Although actually I just noticed I've been using the wrong tense there, too.)

It doesn't help that I've been spending most of my time since we arrived here with Danny, who is firmly mired in English, and our friends Pam (American) and Romano (Italian, but English-fluent), for whom speaking English with us is infinitely easier than helping us limp along in moron Italian. We need them to do the talking for us with, for example, the gas company (which has yet to turn on our gas...it's 12 days and counting), and even in non-crucial situations letting them be our spokespeople is the path of least resistance.

Moreover, many Italians apparently study English in school, and lately we seem to be running into people who are eager to practice. So when I try to speak Italian to the waiter at one of our favorite restaurants or the man who runs the vegetable stand, they immediately switch to English, which they are much more proficient at than I am at Italian.

I became really discouraged when I began slipping on DuoLingo. A little badge on the site tells you how fluent you are--a wildly optimistic number always, but it makes me feel good. I was stuck at 67 percent for ages (which means I am about 13 percent fluent in fact, but whatever). Then one day I got a little electronic fanfare and Duo the owl announced that I'd moved up to 68 percent fluent. I swelled with pride. Then I got a few answers wrong--I mean, like, two--and the number slid back down to 67 percent. This went on for more than a week...I'd momentarily get to 68, then fall back again. Even my laptop knew I wasn't putting enough effort into this.

This week, finally, I seem to have made it to 68 percent semipermanently.

Yay me. But my problems with Italian comprehension out in the real world persist. 

 

So now I am determined to put my back into it. A few days ago Pam and I went to see "Il filo nascosto," the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis that we know as "The Phantom Thread." Like most movies here, it was dubbed, and I grasped perhaps 8 percent of the dialogue. But I did get when the nasty sister says to the girlfriend, "He likes a bit of belly." (Right?)

Che brutto!

Luckily for me, the visuals were as important as the words (although man, those clothes were ugly!). And just listening hard to Italian for an hour and a half was salutary.

This week I'm making more of an effort to get out and deal with things in Italian, without Pam to help me. I went to the garbage office this morning, determined to get my recycling containers, only to discover it's only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Well, I am going back tomorrow.

I am also trying harder to engage in conversation with my neighbors. Today I asked these ladies if I could photograph their chihuahas, and we proceeded to discuss how cute the dogs are. (Diplomacy is part of speaking a foreign language, after all.) Both ladies and dogs were very patient with my halting Italian.

I was pleased with myself, since in addition to a few sentences of conversational Italian, I gathered new evidence of Italian canine fashion, old-age mobility, and feminine footwear, all things of interest to my readers.

My friend Franca, who patiently allows me to babble in Italian with her for long stretches (in exchange for letting her talk to me in English), has been busy or out of town since we got here. I'm looking forward to seeing her later this week and hoping that she has time to help me clear some of the rust off my language brain. Maybe I can get up to 15 percent real-world fluency before it's time to go back to California again.