I run around the first week pinching myself because I really can’t believe I’m on
sabbatical and I’m here in Firenze and then I spend a great weekend in Roma with
Anna doing all sorts of things and then I come back “home” and continue distressing
and setting things up and going to the gym and going shopping what seems like
every day because it took me awhile to figure out that my local grocery store
has only five baskets so you can only buy what you can carry from the aisle to
the checkout counter and that just seems to keep you going to the store more
often but otherwise I’m having a mini vacation because I know school is going
to start soon and learning the language is one of my goals for my sabbatical.
Yesterday I get up at 7:15am because I wasn’t not sure how
long it’s going to take me to get ready and out the door and walk to school but
I shower and I wear a nice sweater and I go to my local “bar” for a cappuccino on
the way to school because that’s what almost every Italian has in the morning
and I get to school knowing that the very first thing they’re going to do is
give me a test to see how much Italian I know and the last time I took a formal
test was to get my fundraising certification and before that it was a test at this
very same language school when I was over here in 2001 so I knew what to
expect.
There are easily a dozen people taking the entrance exam and
we are given an hour to complete as much as of it we can and so we start and
the first parts are pretty easy and I’m feeling pretty good about things and
then it gets more difficult and like every student everywhere I start guessing
at the answers and that just gets me into trouble and then there are things
that I just didn’t know or couldn’t remember so they were just left blank and
then the hour is up and I’m feeling like a stupid idiot that I didn’t spend all
of the last week reviewing what I had studied before.
Then Lapo which is an Italian short-form for the name Jacob
sits down and goes through each one of our tests in front of everybody and we
have the verbal portion of our assessment and this is where I start to feel
like a complete idiot because about 7 of the 12 people who took the test have Spanish
as a first or second language and Italian and Spanish are pretty similar and
they’re having these completely animated conversations in fluent Italian and I’m
sitting there with poor Tatiana from Moscow thinking to myself how come these
people want to study Italian they already know the freaking language but I put
those thoughts aside and I have my verbal test with Lapo and then this part
ends and we have a 20 minute break so I go out for another cappuccino and then I
come back and I’m put into an existing class which Lapo thinks matches how much
Italian I know already.
Well Tatiana from Moscow joins me in the class and there is
already another Tatiana from Russia in this class so our teacher Francesca
quickly numbers them Tatiana uno and Tatiana due and since we are joining a
class that is already in progress and we know nobody there Tatiana and I
introduce ourselves and the other students introduce themselves and then
Francesca continues where she left off before the break.
Now, at the Instituto
Italiano di Cultura where I have taken many of my Italian classes the pace is
fairly relaxed and in any given 10 week semester you would cover two maybe
three chapters of the textbook at the most which is a lot given you’re learning
many different aspects of the language all at once. The farthest I’ve ever
reached in my textbook was Unit 6 which at the Instituto was the end of “Intermediate
2” which was pretty advanced for someone casually studying Italian but never
seeming to use it very often.
Well the class I was thrown into was a Beginner 2 type class
which was studying the imperfetto or the imperfect present tense which is a
verb tense I must had studied long ago but completely forgotten about but which is
incredibly useful when you’re speaking Italian every day and so I go with the
flow and it seems to be a pretty easy conjugation but somewhere along the line
Francesca mentions that these students have already studied i verbi reflessivi and
I think to myself have I ever studied reflexive verbs?
So this verb type comes up again today in class and I think to
myself that I had better learn reflexive verbs so this afternoon after school
and before the gym I do my homework and then I look for information on
reflexive verbs in my old textbook and there they are in Unit 9 and there is
the imperfetto in Unit 7 and I think to myself WOW I don’t think I’ve ever
gotten this far before so I’m going to write my friend Elin and tell her about
this and have another glass of vino and go to bed and tomorrow is another day
and I have fifteen and a half more weeks to figure it all out.
