Buon Giorno Italia!

Last weekend I visited my brother Brett in Italy, where he is spending a few weeks working and traveling around. After taking 2 and a half years of Italian classes he finally gets to try out his skills!

I joined him in Alonte, a small town an hour west of Venice. He is staying with Chiara and Paolo and helping them with their vineyard, La Pria, and their horses. Here is the link to their website

I took two and a half years of Italian classes and even studied in Florence for a semester. But that was two years ago and I haven’t had much opportunity to practice since. Everybody I talked to in Alonte was patient with me and my Italian skills, even though a lot of what came out of my mouth the first day was French! The extent of my regression was clear, but I could also tell that if I were ever to spend an extended amount of time in Italy I would be able to get it back. By the end of the third night I was doing pretty good! Remembering a language is much easier than learning it for the first time.

I love French, but I have missed Italian. Even though they are both Romance languages, they are fundamentally different in character and intonation. French is sophisticated and sexy in a smooth way. Italian is passionate and animated to the point of being over the top. I also adore the way they use their hands when they speak. There is a joke that goes, ‘How do you make an Italian shut up?’ ‘You tie his hands behind his back!’

But I couldn’t choose between them, their cultures, or their food. I just love them both!

I think the rivalry between them is hilarious. Cyril is not fond of Italians. As I was leaving he jokingly asked me not to go. ‘Their wine isn’t even good!’
The Italians in Alonte told me things like, ‘But seriously, between us and France, it isn’t even a contest, we have the best food.’ or ‘France is beautiful, yes, but the people are not very friendly at all!’

One of my old Italian teachers explained the animosity like this, ‘It all boils down to the fact that they are competing to be the best at the same things: wine, food, and soccer, even the reputation for being the best lovers.’

Brett is thriving there. He has the right kind of temperament for language learning because he is super outgoing. Brett constantly jokes around with Paolo and the farm hands. He also has a notebook with pages and pages of new vocabulary that he has learned since he got there. It is an amusing mixture of normal vocabulary, farming terminology, regional slang, and swear words.

Brett and Paolo picked me up at the train station on Thursday and drove me to the pizzeria in town for an aperitivo with Samuele, the man who held the guinness world record for the longest pizza for a year (1595 meters, 5243 feet). Someone from Napoli broke it the day before I arrived in Italy. He is also very proud of his prize of second best pizza in the world. Unfortunately I never actually got to try it. A few days before I came, Brett was initiated into cult of Neapolitan pizza when he spent time in the pizzeria’s kitchen.

After the aperativo we went to a neighborhood restaurant for lunch with some of the farmhands. It was a classic Italian style meal, with a first course of pasta and second course of meat or fish. Brett is already famous here for how much he can eat, and like proper Italians they are basically force feeding him. ‘What do you mean you don’t want a second steak? Mania, mania, mania!’ (Eat eat eat! in the regional dialect) Brett is going to be a heavyweight by the time he leaves!

In the afternoon it rained, so we chilled in the farm house and talked to farmhands and whoever happened to pop in. Paolo and Chiara have a business boarding horses and giving horse riding lessons, so people are always dropping by. I got the impression that in this region western riding is very popular, along with the whole culture that comes with it: country line dancing, American and confederate flags, flashy belts, and cowboy boots. They all dream of the famous wide open spaces of the western United States. Some of these horse aficionados have taken trips to the southwest or Wyoming to tour ranches and ride horses.
It is a facet of Italian culture that I never encountered in Florence!

At night Brett and I ate dinner with Paolo and Chiara and their son Giulio. Again, there was too much food!

Friday I helped Brett and two farmhands, Giovanni and Denis, prune the vines. I figured I shouldn’t freeload on Chiara and Paolo’s hospitality. I have missed working with and being around plants since I have lived in Paris.

The landscape there is similar to Tuscany with its rolling hills and vineyards. At this time of the year poppies (Papaver rhoeas), common agricultural weeds, are in full bloom in fields and ditches.

Saturday Brett and I took the train into Venice to explore and get lost in the winding streets. I adore Venice; for me it is the most beautiful city in the world.

The view from San Marco Campanile

 

I am sorry, I can’t help myself, I have to throw in pictures of beautiful flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) that I spotted there!

Brett wanted so badly to speak Italian to people, but it isn’t easy in a place as touristy as Venice. Most people hear the accent and switch right away to English which is frustrating. However, we did find some nice Italians to humor us in little shops.

Carnivale, mad max style

That night back in Alonte, Chiara and Paolo hosted a huge steak grill out with their riding friends.

They took out wine from their cellar as well as homemade grappa and rosolio alcohols. Grappa is made from the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems left over from the winemaking process, and rosolio is made from rose petals. It was the first time I had ever heard of or tried rosolio- it is so good!
We ate and drank and talked until one in the morning, a lovely end to my time in Italy.

 

Embarrassing things I have said in French

Making a fool of yourself is a natural part of learning another language. Overall I am very happy with my progress in French but I have made my fair share of funny/embarrassing mistakes. After writing so much about my students’ mistakes I figured to be fair I should share some of my own with you guys!

Sometimes I misunderstand questions. I feel so stupid when that happens. Someone asks me a question and  I start responding, then I can tell by their expression that I didn’t really understand…

Sometimes my accent gets in the way. I say a word just slightly wrong (at least to my ears), and people don’t understand me. One time I was speaking to someone about grammaire (grammar) and they thought I was saying grand-mère (grandmother). They asked me, ‘Whose grandmother? My grandmother? Your grandmother?‘ In my defense, they sound remarkably similar in French. Also, the difference between vingt (twenty) and vin (wine) gets me every time. Those nasal vowels are hard!

One time at the end of a meal I told Cyril’s parents ‘Je suis pleine,‘ a direct translation of our expression, ‘I am full’, but if you say it in French it means you are drunk.

One time, I was trying to explain to someone that most of my ancestors were Germans that immigrated to the US, but I mispronounced the French word for ancestors and instead kept saying the French word for incest.

At a party, I asked the host ‘Ou est la salle de bain?‘ (Where is the bathroom?). The host laughed and kindly explained to me that I should instead ask ‘Ou est la toilette?‘ (Where is the toilet?) because when you ask someone in France for the bathroom it sounds like you want to take a shower. Also, the toilet is sometimes in a little separate room apart from the bathroom anyway, so they might not direct to the right place if you ask for the bathroom.

I used to say ‘Est-ce que tu est fini?‘ (Are you finished?) Instead of ‘Est-ce que tu a fini?‘ (Have you finished?) Then Cyril explained to me that when I ask ‘Are you finished?‘, it sounds like I am asking if the person is done being made, like in the womb.

I make up words all the time. Sometimes I will take an English word, give it a French accent, and use it. This works for some words like immigration, weekend, bus, but not all the words I try to use it for. But I think a lot of people do that when learning another language. It is funny when my students try to guess what the English word is by pronouncing a French word in an English way.

One day in January, Cyril and I were walking somewhere and I remarked, ‘ Hmmm! Smells like firs!‘ In French, they call Christmas trees Christmas firs, and often just firs for short. Nearby there must have been a recycling drop off for the trees. Cyril was unnerved, ‘Well actually, you shouldn’t say that in French. It is an old expression that means someone is going to die soon. Coffins used to be made of fir wood. You actually really creeped me out when you said that…‘

One time I called a ‘crèche‘ a ‘crècherie‘. A crèche is a nursery, and adding erie to the end makes it sound like a place where they grow or make babies. A boulangerie is a bakery and a porcherie is where pigs are raised.

Cyril and I were planning our skiing trip with his aunt. She had offered to bring extra skiing gear from her stash at home for us to use during our trip. She asked me, ‘So what do you need?‘ I said, ‘First of all I need gloves and a hat.‘ I used the word chapeau for hat, but the french use a different word to say winter hat (bonnet). They thought it was hilarious because they imagined me going down the slopes in a fancy lady’s hat.

Even though I have forgotten most of my Spanish and Italian, sometimes random words will come out when I am trying to speak French. One time I asked Cyril’s aunt, ‘Can I please have a spoon?‘ Blank looks… ‘You want a what?‘ ‘Can I please have a spoon?…Oh wait, that is Italian, how do you say spoon again in French?’ I used cucchiaio instead of cuillère. There are certain words, like spoon, that I always use the Italian or Spanish word for. I don’t know why!

One time I asked Cyril ‘Est-ce que tu a mangé le reste de la pain (lapin)?‘ instead of ‘Le reste du pain‘. So it sounded like I asked if he had finished eating the rest of the rabbit instead of the rest of the bread just because I gave bread the wrong gender. Like other Romance languages, all nouns have a gender. They are mostly assigned at random (it seems to me anyway). Just another layer of things to memorize!

Cyril and I were biking in the countryside and we passed a sign that said Maçonnerie (masonry) and I didn’t see the ç and asked ‘what is a maconnerie?‘ Which sounds like ‘my stupidity’ (ma connerie).

A few months ago I had Cyril correct a cover letter that I wrote in French. French is tricky because a lot of words sound the same but are spelled differently. So spell check doesn’t catch my mistakes either. I wrote ‘alaise‘ when I meant ‘a l’aise‘. So instead of saying I was comfortable with speaking French I wrote about adult diapers.

I learn a lot of words by listening to and conversing with French people. Because of this sometimes I learn and use slang words that are inappropriate or too casual.
For example, during conversations with my vb friends, a lot of people I talked with used the word bosser. So I asked one of them, ‘What does that mean?‘ ‘Oh it is another word for work‘. Then I started using the word when I spoke, until Cyril heard me and explained to me, ‘Hmm, you shouldn’t use that word… that is slang, and with your accent it sounds like you are trying too hard to speak French like a local.‘ (Kind of like a guy with an Indian accent saying, ‘Yo, what’s up man?’)

One time I asked Cyril, ‘Can we go check out that exhibition?‘ He laughed and corrected me, ‘Exhibition is when someone is naked in public. Exposition is an art show.‘ And it is hard for me to remember the difference. To make it worse, Cyril ‘corrects’ me whenever I am using the right word because he thinks it is hilarious when I talk going to this or that ‘exhibition‘.

Until next time!