I saw this cartoon by Robert Leighton recently and it really hit home because it’s so true. A couple looks like they are in Italy, on the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence. And the wife says to the husband, “Not only do they all speak fluent English, but they keep correcting your grammar.”
I don’t know if I can republish it here on my blog, so here it is at CartoonStock.
I’ve been saying for the longest time that in many foreign countries, people speak English, yet in the U.S., most of us don’t speak other languages. I find that very humbling. You can actually spend time in Rome and not have a language issue. Thanks to their ability to speak English.
So many people in Italy, France and other parts of Europe speak English and even in places like Egypt and the middle east, that’s true, to.
I’m told that’s because they learn in school from a young age and apparently they do an excellent job since it’s not something we learn in the U.S. and then forget. Learning from an early age is crucial to learning a new language.
Many have thick accents, of course, but that makes it even more endearing. And you can tell if people learned words from reading, rather than hearing them, when they pronounce them as they are spelled.
Along with English, I speak Spanish and I can understand Italian, but not speak it. And that sounds weird, but it’s because Spanish and Italian are so close in many ways, many words are the same or very close, but then other words are totally different, so it’s hard to speak one language when you speak the other – but not difficult if you can understand every few words.
When the new pope was giving a speech in Italian, I could get the gist of it because I might understand 80% of the language and could figure out the other words by what he was saying. So it’s easy to listen and understand that way, but of course, not an easy to thing to speak since I would have to know every word to speak it.
One of my friends goes to Italy at least once a year and she attends Italian school when she is there. This October she is meeting up with a group, but she is going there a few weeks earlier so she can attend the school. She also lives with an Italian family for a bit, so as to immerse herself in the language. I guess it’s like an Airbnb where you live on the premises with the owners of the property.
I learned Spanish in school when I was a kid, but I also live in Miami, where Spanish seems to be the prominent language in many cases – so I was immersed most of my life – my friends speak Spanish, and English of course; and I’ve learned from books, from tv and just hearing it on the street.
It’s all about immersion.
Receive an email each time I publish this Tomversation blog
by clicking here
