learning Italian and phrase books and italian for dummies and basic reader and dictionary

Whenever I travel to a different country, I try to learn that country's language. This not only assures me that I won't travel very much in life but it puts a brake on the notion that I really can understand what is going on there without first trying partially to divest myself of one of my most cherished possessions--my own language. Perhaps this is too rigid or too Puritan a way of looking at the world, but it is where I am now. I think also I have done this in order to try to do my little part to erase the notion of the "Ugly American" which is prevalent the world over. If 20 and 30-something Sustainability people can urge us to "make a difference" by how we discard our rubbish or use our resources, certainly I can urge us to develop this one little step to combat the image of monolingual and blind Americans who travel abroad.

Thus, when I learned in March that I was going to Italy in June, I had to work fast. I managed to find two Italian teachers in town, one of whom could meet with me twice a week and one only a few times. I realized quickly that I needed five kinds of books in order to learn the language quickly and well: (1) a basic dictionary; (2) a grammar/lesson book; (3) a phrase book; (4) the book 501 Italian Verbs and (5) a rather simple "reader." Because tapes/CDs are readily available, I could also listen to my heart's content to them on the Net or on my tape recorder. The first four are easy to find. I used the Living Language Italian Dictionary for the first task, both because it is a handy size (about 15,000 words) and because it has more than 5,000 phrases and senstences illustrating definitions. Italian for Dummies, in the famous "Dummies" series, is a good grammatical introduction. I also used Hugo's Italian in 3 Months. Phrase books are very common--you can pick them up and try out various situations that your book presents. Finally, I found a little known but good recent book entitled Easy Italian Reader, which has about 60 graduated readings that start easily (two young people meet in Rome, talk about their families, go to restaurants etc.) and then move to more complex pieces on Italian history. You learn both history and language as you study this book.

A Brief Story

The key to my method, however, is one that I share only reluctantly here because it is so widely criticized and ridiculed in our world today. Let me preface it by saying that after studying Italian for less than three months with my method, when I also had "full time" duties as a law professor and was studying for the National Senior Spelling Bee in June (as well as writing lots of essays), I was able to "win" an argument in Italian with a guy at an Italian Rent-a-Car agency who wanted to charge me extra Euros for the rental car because I had gone over the allotted "kilometer limit." What I explained to him in Italian was that the contract for hire of the car had a clause which provided that the company would deliver the car to me with a FULL tank of gas and that I would fill it up before returning the car. In fact, what the rental company did was to give me the car EMPTY, telling me to return it EMPTY. Of course, this is almost impossible to do, especially since you have a daily "free" kilometer limit (150 km per day). So, I pointed out to him the difficulty of estimating the latter, the fact that they had breached the contract by giving me a car that was EMPTY and that a suitable compromise would be not to charge me for the 100+ extra kilometers I had driven in three days. As a friend, who witnessed by "performance" with the guy told me, Italians love to negotiate. So, he honored my suggestion, and knocked off 15 or so Euros from my bill. I say this not so much to commend myself as to give support for my method of learning Italian.

My Method

In a nutshell, I learn Italian by memorizing the language. Of course that sounds quite ridiculous because there is no way that you can memorize all the encounters that you will have, all the situations which require words that are not on your lips, etc. But what I mean, and I am quite serious about it, is that the world of language opens up to you when you memorize the language sentence by sentence. The next essay will illustrate this method in more detail, but I will close this essay by telling you what the method is not.

What the Memorizing Method is NOT

The memorizing method is not primarily the learning of phrases in a phrase book. Sometimes those phrases are helpful, of course, but most of the time I find phrase books to pose questions or situations that never actually occur or that occur so rarely as to be relatively useless. For example, I ran across some of the following in the Collins Italian Phrase Book Dictionary. You tell me if you think you would use many of them. Here we go.

1. "Per favore ci rimandi il suo fax"--Please resend the fax. I know that I had very few occasions to use this phrase as I was looking at medieval churches or towns. I suppose this is supposed to be a phrase for a business person, but it was less than useful.

2. "Posso noleggiare la racchette?"--May I rent the racquet? What is this, a sort of English country club in Italy? I was in no hotel that had "racquet" courts of any kind, nor was renting racquets on my mind even once while in Italy. Given my experience with the rental car company, the book probably should have had an "auto rental" situation. I could help them make it up now, but racquets? Come on.

3. "La batteria e scarica"--The battery is flat. I don't speak that way in English, much less Italian. Actually, batteries in rental cars almost never "go flat" because the cars are relatively new. Rather worthless, don't you agree?

4. "Sono incinta"--I am pregnant. I can think of very few venues in which this phrase will be useful. And, this goes for its cousins: "Prendo la pillola"--I am on the pill; and "Sto allattando al seno"--I am breastfeeding. They are good for a few laughs, of course, and perhaps one in 10,000 tourists will feel the need to tell someone that she is on the pill or breastfeeding, but it hardly ranks up there with directions to the bathroom or a good restaurant or an ATM machine.

5. Well, let's conclude with this one. "Vorrei telefonare il Consolato Britannico,"--I want to call the British Consulate. I think I just want to stop reading the phrase book.

The next essay will illustrate Bill's winning "memorization" method.

1941