I'm sitting in a basement classroom next to another American, conjugating the past perfect tense of to be in my new Italian workbook. Barbara the Brazilian student, sitting on my other side, has already finished and is writing a shopping list in Italian. I'm stuck on the second person plural; M. from Alabama is looking at the pasta diagram on the wall. She appears to be stuck, too.
For reasons I can't exactly understand, taking Italian lessons twice a week is a condition of my stay in Italy. This is my second visit to the basement classroom on Via Bramante, just off the metro stop Piramide, and I feel M. and I may be kindred spirits. I've already memorized the pasta diagram.
Barbara reminds Ernesto, our tutor, that her time is valuable and she has night classes at physical therapy school, so can we hurry it up please? It's only noon. I think this is the point where I start to hate Barbara. Or at least her mastery of multiple languages.
Ernesto is a graduate student who looks like the actor Jeff Goldblum and gripes about American politics between verb exercises. He has a spectacular ponytail. It's clear from the way he talks with Barbara only, in fluent Italian, that he sees little potential in M. and me. We don't mind much.
M. is an au pair, too. She's caregiver for twin boys the same age as the triplets I take care of. Currently we're prisoners to Barbara and Ernesto's conversation in this weird basement with cinder block walls, dreading being called on.
I missed the first two weeks of class, so I have no concept of conversational Italian. I'm learning to conjugate verbs, but I still can't tell time. I've been relying on the children to teach me my numbers and days of the week at bath time. Teaching me how to translate objects in the bathroom delights them to no end. I came all the way from America, I'm a grown up and everything, and I don't know how to say my own phone number? Wow.
Who knew there were so many kinds of pasta, and they all had a name? Gnocchi, rotelle, farfalle.
I gaze back at my workbook, where I've filled in about five of the ten odd blanks and covered the margins with doodles of curlicues. It's going to take me all day at this rate.
I felt the same way when I first got to Japan. I could barely introduce myself> I've gotten a bit more comfortable with what I don't know and look at learning a new language as something that bonds me to my students. But your teacher sounds like a bit of a jerk.
ReplyDelete