Language Lessons

Moving to a country where I don't speak the language may be one of the gutsy-est things I've ever done. It was frustrating for the first couple months, living in a state of quasi-mute and deafness, unable to understand or make myself understood. But after weeks of copying verb conjugations until my hands blistered, reading Magic Tree-house in Italian, and just trying to speak what little language I knew whenever I could, the Italian came. Now, I dream in Italian, occasionally think in Italian - and i don't even realize I'm doing it until i cant "think" something in Italian! There are even times when I cant remember how to say something in English, or i find my wording awkward when I write in English due to lack of practice.  However, this level was not reached without plenty of mistakes along the way - living in another language can produce some very entertaining results.

In an effort to impress one of my teachers with my ever-expanding vocabulary, I tried to tell her that "there was a big mess in France" but somehow, I used a rather rude word for "brothel" instead of mess. After recovering from the shock of hearing me say such a word, she quickly pointed out my error and kindly suggested i not repeat anything i hear from any of my classmates. This it turns out, is very good advice.

I was talking to  a friend, telling about my life in the US when I was discussing my pets - when I said i had three pet dogs - and a pet peach. I mixed up the word for "fish" (pesce) with the word for "peach" (pesche). My friend was very confused, and thought that us American must be very strange for keeping domestic fruits.

I thoroughly confused one of my teachers when I mixed up the words for braces (apparuchiere) and wigs (paruchiere) when i told my teacher that in the US it was very common for teenagers to have wigs.


I had a good laugh with my literature teacher (why oh why is it always the teachers!?!) when I told her I wanted to read Dante's "Inverno" (Inverno means "winter" rather than Dante's Inferno). I then corrected myself by saying "one's a lot hotter".

My most egregious error was that in the first two weeks, every time i said the word year (anno) i replaced it with the word "ano" which refers to the posterior... And no one bothered to tell me this for about two weeks...i always wondered why people gave me such weird looks when i told them i was going to be in Italy for a year.

Rest assured that i have made plenty more mistakes than those listed here, and that there will assuredly be plenty more to come.