I have lots of stories from the October break or “La Toussaint”, yoga class, couture class, a weekend excursion to les châteaux de la loire, circus, and my part time job at a financial advising company to share. But for now, here is an update about my Italian class, taught in French! Also, time to celebrate the 2 month marker in Clermont-Ferrand! (2 months and 3 days as of today)
New photos: (without captions yet, they are coming soon!)
Yes, I'm taking Italian... in French. I have a French-Italian dictionary, and a French-English dictionary. I plan to use them in some sort of confusing triangle. My teacher is half French, half Italian, and I am more than half confused more than half of the time in class. She is a petite, dark haired, incredibly animated and slightly crazy woman in her mid 40s. I admire the fact that she can flip seamlessly between the two languages, as well as the two (somewhat stereotypical, but still amusing) personalities that go along with each. The first day she made an impression of the “French way of talking”, sat up straight with a tight mouth that hardly opened when she spoke softly, and pretentiously. Next was the “Italian” impression: loud, mouth making all kinds of crazy movements, total change in body language, alive. She is great.
As of now, I know the alphabet, the numbers 1-20, how to ask how something is spelled, what something means, tell you where I am from, ask you where you are from, and make the conjugations for the verbs to be, to have, and to speak. Impressed? I thought so. Italian is actually pretty cool because grammatically, its really close to French (from what I can see so far). I accept the fact that this may make me a huge nerd for thinking this is awesome. The thing that I find really hard (so far) is the pronunciation, and the tone to use when speaking, it seems a little more musical than French and I have a hard time hearing the differences between the “songs”. And anyone who knows me at all, knows I have no sense of music at all.
I just found out (after 4 classes) that pronouns are not used in italian (from what I can gather...). Can anyone confirm this? Our class doesn't have an organized textbook of defined lessons on vocabulary, grammar, and culture, but rather we are given handouts each day where we learn random words and expressions, often forcing ourselves into confusing conversations about “guess which number between 1 and 100 I am thinking of”. Sometimes (yesterday for example) our teacher will go around and ask us questions in Italian. Sometimes (yesterday for example) she will speak in what I hear to be gibberish. Since I don't know the expression for “I do not understand” in Italian, I resorted to facial expressions and gestures that get the rest of the class giggling. The worst part is when she tries to explain herself to me in French, again due to nervousness and brain overload, I do not understand. You can see why this is difficult. At least I know how to tell her in French that I don't get whats happening. Kristen, Elsa and I have decided to try and get together once a week to figure out what the heck is going on here, and how to actually retain the things we are or are not learning. Nevertheless, I'll be getting to try out some of what I may or may not be learning during part of my winter vacation, visiting Rome and Sicily with my friend Sal who has family there.
Hope everyone's doing well! Would love to hear what you are up to too. If anyone wants postcards, send me your addresses! colleen.mcintee07@kzoo.edu
xoxo
Colleen
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