Learning Italian not by the book.
By Schuyler Daffey
Illustration by Kathleen Halley-Segal
“Ah, incredibile!” I say, nodding fervently at Anna. The junior sits opposite me in the small Hamilton classroom that has become our euphonious haven of relaxed chatter, questionable verb conjugations, and even more erroneous vocab usage. She has just made what I am sure is an excellent point about the tranquility of the countryside… or perhaps she was musing on where she would like to work once she graduates. In my defense, the Italian words for compagnia (company) and campagna (countryside) sound awfully alike. I valiantly forge forward with, “Sono d’accordo! Prefer—Preferisco la vita urbana perché mi piace essere occupato” —Occupata,” our professor gently intones from the front of the room.“Occupata,” I continue, “E inoltre sono cresciuta nella città, specificamente, a Londra."
“Londra!” My professor repeats delightedly, “Ma quali sono le differenze tra New York e Londra secondo la tua esperienza?” I groan internally—now I’ve done it. To my classmates, I am not a mere student but an emissary from the United Kingdom, equipped with a myriad of facts about the daily life, finances, and politics of the UK. I have been bequeathed the responsibility of opining on English culture and assessing how specific issues, ranging from urban crime rates, to national cuisine, to relative cap and trade capacities, differ from the United States.
“Si,” I begin grandly, eager to loquaciously contour the advantages and disadvantages of an entire nation on a wintry Tuesday evening in my best Italian. “There are certainly much differences between London and this city. From the start I was very shock by the height of buildings and furthermore how much people there is here in comparison with London.”
“But London not have a much higher population than New York?” a sophomore to my right chimes in pointedly, and I regret my mentioning London at all. I have seen how this plays out, and it now seems that I’ll be debating relative population densities and urban sprawl (neither of which I know the word for) for the rest of the evening. The act of comparing cities is a euphoric experience for my Italian teacher, and seemingly what we’ll be devoting the rest of our lesson time today to. We regularly run into several topics of conversation that consume the rest of our class discussion; my class is replete with snow sports enthusiasts and so we'll invariably turn to rating the best skiing in the Northeast, and in 30 minutes, somewhere amid the throaty r’s and wide diphthongs of the Italian that filled the room, we’ll be puzzling through the conjugations for the verb sciare, or Googling the word for chairlift in Italian.
Despite only being worth two credits—a seemingly negligible blip between my English and History majors—I keep returning to Language Conversation courses at Columbia. Perhaps I am drawn to the people I have met through them: graduate students, engineers, and native speakers alike, none of whom I would have encountered otherwise. And in these intimate eight person classes, where discussion ranges from our thoughts on the Grammys red carpet, to the future of academia in the advent of AI, to whether Shen Yun really is a cult, I’ve gotten to know my classmates in a way that can be difficult to replicate in dispassionate 200 person lectures.
This discourse textures my week, infusing my days with vibrancy amid the mundane drudgery of readings and discussion sections. I interact with different personalities and am exposed to the intricacies of so many other lives. There is undeniably something about stringing together a roughly smoothed out first person future tense conjugation, making that thrilling split second decision about whether to use the a or di preposition, matching the adjectival endings exactly, so that all the parts of the sentence hang one by one on a gossamer thread. And then to speak those sentences into existence and look around the room, hoping that someone caught hold of that thread and understood what I was trying to express; it’s one of the more vulnerable experiences I’ve had. So I may not be “getting to know” my classmates in the usual sense. While I’ve spent the entire semester getting to understand the contours and edges of my classmates’ experiences and ideas, the foreign language obstacle means that I sometimes miss crucial factual details. We do, however, get to witness each other in a state of mutual unguardedness, of stumbling many times, in a process that—at universities like ours—is generally private. As Iris Murdoch says, language learning requires immense humility and honesty because one must “not…pretend to know what one does not know” in order to grow. These conversation classes can be defined as one long exercise in attempting and failing and trying again. There is no defined end point, never a moment when I can say confidently that I’ve “succeeded,” because even understanding each other is “succeeding.” Returning to English at the end of class is a strange thing; I stumble over my words, suddenly shy about speaking to these people I have seen so much of through the lens of Italian. I think of L. P. Hartley’s avowal that “The past is a foreign country.” Admittedly, Hartley is suggesting that the past is so alien to our present that it is an entirely different place. I can’t help but wonder, though: When we leave the classroom, this foreign country of failure and vulnerability we’ve inhabited briefly, do we return to a different reality?
Today, we listen to a classmate play a jazz standard on his alto sax and then discuss his performance using words like allegro and vivacissimo. It is frigid, early February weather (fa un freddo cane!) and utterly dark outside by the time I leave Hamilton at 7:30, and I know that the walk back to Ruggles will invariably numb my fingers and toes. For the moment, however, I am warmed by the small community of language learners around me and by my amore per il—no, la—lingua italiana.