learning italian and method in learning a language and italy and memorization

Though I am still very much of a novice in speaking Italian, after having only studied it twice a week for three months, I have come upon a method which works well for me. This method enabled me to "make my case" successfully with an Italian bureaucrat and evoke comments from Italians about my ability to construct sentences and have a conversation. Admittedly, since I was in Italy during the time of the World Cup, when Italy was eliminating the competition right and left, all I had to do to get people going was to say "la coppa mundial," but still I had to be able to respond to their excited ejaculations about their team.

Pure and simple, my method in learning a language is to memorize hundreds of sentences which reflect actual ways people talk and then try to use them or sentences similar to them when speaking. When you combine this with patient working through a grammar and awareness of how the Italian verb "works" (through the 501 Italian Verbs book), you have all the rudiments for skillful conversation. Let me illustrate the method by using two kinds of sentences: (1) basic conversational sentences; and (2) sentences expressing thought.

Basic Conversational Sentences

In order to make progress in any language you need to express desire as well as to raise questions of the "who, what, where, when, how, why?" type. You also need to be able to express all kinds of what I call "quick thoughts," such as "I am in a hurry" or "what is this in Italian?" or time/date of something. There is no substitute for learning these phrases. Who is "Chi?" and "Chi e?", meaning "who is it?", is a useful question. More useful still is "Dov'e," which means "Where is?" "Dov'e il bagno?" (bathroom) or "Dov'e la stazione?" or "Per favore, puo dirmi dov'e un buon restaurante vicino di qui?" Ah, I got away with expanding a sentence in this final example, but it is trivially easy to follow. "Please, can you (formal) tell me (dirmi) where there is a good restaurant near here?" But you see immediately how you can move from one word "dov'e" to a sentence without much difficulty at all. "Dov'e" takes you a great distance, so to speak. "What" is the word "Come"(two syllables) and an easy way to ask how another is doing is, "Come va?" (i.e., "how goes it?"). "Come si arriva li?" is "How do you get there?" (I just introduced the "si," a "reflexive" pronoun, which can be tricky). When "come" is written "com'e," it becomes "what is?" (You have to memorize the present tense of the verb "to be," the third person singular of which is "e"). When "come" or "com'e" is used not as an interrogative, it is translated "how" or "as.' Thus if someone said, "Com'e triste!" that person would be saying "How said it is!" The phrase "bella come il sole" is easy enough: "beautiful as the sun."

Ah, now you are beginning to "catch" my method, I hope. You can begin to make lists of very short sentences to express quite common thoughts and then commit them to memory, using them either with yourself or with someone else who is also learning the language. You can do this with tons of other basic words, gradually building an array of sentences that will get you not only to the nearest bathroom but also will allow you to express emotions and rudimentary thoughts to people. And then, you go on to the more difficult stuff.

More Advanced Sentences

Not everything in life can be expressed by short phrases or simple questions. You have to be able to move to the realm of more abstract thought and more descriptive sentences. How do you do that? Very gingerly. Let me suggest two methods.

First, be especially attentive to useful sentences you run into as you begin to read the language. You will discover that some verbs are used over and over again, and have a pretty wide field of meaning. I have found, for example, that the verbs "prendere" (to take, catch); "trovare" (to find; in the reflexive it is "feel"); and "funcionare" (to work, as in "the car works") to be quite useful. In addition, words like "credere" (to believe) or "pensare" (to think) can often "buy you time," when you are figuring out what to say. "Credo che...." means "I think that..." Here you need to have constant access to your 501 Italian Verbs so that you can figure out the correct tense and person of the verb to use. But you also find sentences in newspapers, brief articles or books that you simply want to memorize. Do so. Write them down. Say them to someone. Look for an opportunity to use them or like words.

Second, I have found to be most useful a huge one-volume Italian dictionary put out by Oxford U Press called the Oxford Paravia Italian Dictionary. The second edition is due by the end of September 2006 so I am waiting to buy that one, but the first is immensely useful. It has perhaps 100,000 sentences or usages in which every important Italian word is used, as well as a like number of sentences in which you can go from English to Italian. In order to begin to study this dictionary I began by picking a few Italian words, such as "dovuto" ("due") or "appoggiare" (to lean on). Then I wrote down some sentences which the dictionary gives. For example, it gives the following for "dovuto." (1) piu del dovuto--"more than due" or (2) la somma dovuta-- "the sum due" or (3) il mio ritardo e dovuto agli ingorghi stradeli--"my delay was due to crowded streets" or (4) questo incidente e dovuto all' imprudenza--"this accident was due to carelessness." Of course, this does not help you very much if you want to know directions to the Pantheon, but it gives you a sense of how the langauge begins to work. By committing these thoughts to memory you, consciously or unconsciously, begin to internalize the structure of thoughts and not simply a phrase or two that expresses what you immediately want.

I could go on and on (and you certainly believe me). For example, appoggiare il capo sul cuscino means "to lean/rest one's head on a pillow" or appoggiare una scala contro il muro means "to lean a ladder against a wall." If you appoggiare tutto il proprio peso su (contro)...you are "leaning all your weight on..." something. Then, if you felt you were getting in over your head, you could "retreat" to the little word "contro" and learn that dire il pro ed il contro means "to state the pro and the con."

Conclusion

If you diligently, or even in a less-than-diligent fasion, pursue this method, you will not only be speaking Italian quickly, but you will amaze Italian speakers by how much you seem to grasp the language itself and not simply a phrase or two. Good luck to you.

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