“What’s that crazy Buckley guy up to today?” you almost certainly wondered this morning as you got out of bed. Ha! I knew it. Well, here’s what that crazy Buckley guy is up to: learning Italian.
My wife and I are planning on going to Italy someday (like, 2013 maybe) and we figured that would be a lot more fun if we actually knew how to talk to people. So, Italian it is.
First thing we did was cover our house in Post-It notes. Sounds silly, but if everything in your house is labeled with its Italian word, you remember it pretty quick. Later on we got a labelmaker and put that to work too. Yeah, our house looks a little weird right now, but who cares? We’re learning.
(“Oh, man, that crazy Buckley guy!” you chuckle, sipping your $800 glass of wine. “Will he never cease to amuse?”)
Another great tool for learning Italian? This right here:
The Italian English Bilingual Visual Dictionary. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a bunch of pictures labeled in both English and Italian, so if you’re a visual learner (like me) you have something to tie the words to instead of just other words. And let’s face it, looking at pictures is just more fun. A whole page of nothing but words? I mean, that would suck.
Ahem.
Anyway they have books for German, Spanish, Arabic, French, and other languages too, so if that sort of thing sounds interesting, grab yourself a copy and you won’t regret it.
Other tactics include: CDs in the car, configuring Chrome to run in Italian mode and use google.it as its homepage, streaming Italian TV channels on the computer, talking in Italian with my wife, and generally mumbling the Italian words for things as I go about my daily business.
“Groovy,” you say (because you’re a refugee from Woodstock, apparently) “but what kind of groovadelic Italian stuff have you actually learned?”
Here are – BAM! – no fewer than three cool Italian things I’ve learned:
1. Italian has six words for “the.” SIX! What. The. Eff? English (which is obviously the best language, because I speak it) gets by just fine on one – and Japanese has zero, those crazy cats – but I’m not a poly-definite-article hater by any means. French has three, Spanish rocks out with four, whatever. But six? Seriously, get that shit together. We’ve got company.
2. Italian uses the same word for “breast” and “sinus.” I really can’t explain this at all. All I know is that if you go to the Italian Wikipedia and type in “seno,” you get a disambiguation page. I just…I mean…I really can’t explain this at all.
3. Italian can teach you about English. Okay, I feel stupid for admitting this, but I never actually noticed that cranes (the machine) are so called because they look like cranes (the bird). I know, shut up. But listen – you know how I finally realized this? Because the Italian word for both – la gru – is also the same. And I was all like “That’s weird, why would they have the same ohhhhh.” (Actually Italian can help you learn lots of other, non-retarded stuff about English too, but that’s another story.)
Any peeps out there learning a foreign language? Want to share any tips?
Brian D. Buckley 
I would love to learn Italian – it is such a gorgeous language. And the people – ah, the people. When we go skiing, we go to a little town in Italy rather than any of the big French resorts. One key thing is that the people there are so lovely.
I love the labelling idea – very clever!
So you’ve been to Italy? Cool! You’ve got me even more excited about my own trip now.
I’ve always been meaning to learn Japanese…and now you just inspired me to get some programs to start doing just that. I’m not gonna live forever!
In Spanish there’s 4 words for the? *knows Spanish…supposedly*
Hmmm…I know there’s el, and la…..but what else….
*ponders about this for the rest of the day*
Japanese is a very, very hard language to learn. Mainly because of all the kanji. But it would be totally worth it. Give it a shot. 😀
The other two words are “los” and “las.”
Oh yeah, the plurals. I knew that!!