Parlo Italiano un po

In a much-needed attempt to slot some productive, yet escapist, fun into my life, I've enrolled in Italian class. I have no immediate plans to travel to Italy, although I would like to visit someday. I just love learning languages; call me a dork, but my brain is wired that way.

I first took an Italian class years ago, when I lived in Minneapolis. I lasted all of about five weeks I think, before I got bored and gave it up. The only thing I remembered was the phrase, "Dov'è il gabinetti?" which means, "Where are the bathrooms?" A totally useful phrase, to be sure, but only if you could understand the response. Which I could not.

So here I am, xx+ years later, older and wiser, and more in need of something stimulating to keep my brain from shriveling up into a knot of staff schedules and book orders. I actually made it through Italian I, and last week, started Italian 2/3. A lot of the people are continuing from that last class, which is nice, because we're all comfortable with each other. One problem many of us seem to have, though, is filtering Italian through a different foreign language. When I'm stuck for a word, it's French that pops into my head. It feels very strange to me, because I haven't taken French since college (during the Mesozoic Era) and I never achieved any real fluency. Yet all these words and phrases keep popping into my head. Como se chiama? Je m'appelle Collie, merci.

Last night was our second night of review, and it's slowly (but painfully) coming back to me: numbers, letters, verb conjugations, etc. For one of our exercises, we had to take a picture from a magazine and write a sentence describing what we saw. We then critiqued each others' sentences for spelling, grammar, etc. Not to brag or anything, but mine was the only sentence that didn't require correction (key tip: keep the sentence simple). What was this literary masterpiece, you ask? Why, please allow me to share:

Il letto è bianco e i cuscini sono azzurri.

And that's all she wrote.