impractical practice
I’m learning Italian. I’m totally embarrassed about it. I have my reasons. I don’t want you to know my reasons because that would entail me over explaining a simple five-minute a day commitment. That isn’t necessarily at all.
Anyway, I have always wanted to learn Italian because most of my family is Italian. I have long been discouraged from learning it (and consequently discouraged myself) because Spanish is Italian’s more successful cousin. I studied Spanish for a long time in school. (Italian was not offered in my school, which is probably not a shock to you.) I enjoyed learning Spanish and had aspirations of one day conversing in it until I made my way into AP Spanish Literature. For context, this meant that I had passed (and performed well) in AP Spanish Language. The Spanish Literature class, however, was a totally different beast. We had to read highbrow literature, not stories about Raul and Paolo going to the biblioteca after school because they are dos amigos. This was literature for fluent speakers, so it had nuance and innuendo and certainly no bibliotecas.
Soon after I spent a few hours translating a one page poem about a horse only to learn that horse was a metaphor for the author’s masculine sexuality, I dropped the course. It was the only course I recall dropping in high school. I had no idea what was going on in any of the stories. The best I could do was translate each word and pray our teacher didn’t ask me for a breakdown of the literary devices. My classmates didn’t seem to understand it either, but appeared unfazed or at least pretended to be. I don’t even regret dropping it because that year was the second worse year of my life (i.e., second to this year) due to the intense depression I experienced.
That leads me to a few years ago when I felt inspired on a vacation to Italy with my family. I decided that I would learn Italian and learn it quickly. Of course, my perfectionism wasn’t going to let me make the thousands of mistakes necessary to learn anything, especially an entire language so that plan fell to the wayside. I would stop and start in fits.
Then, this year, after a particularly difficult family loss, I concluded that Italian is a language. You’re shocked; I can feel it. It is a series of grammar rules and sounds that help you communicate. There is no reason I can’t learn it. Now, I’m using a free online platform to learn some basic words each day. I’m making so many mistakes and that makes me so uncomfortable. I never feel like I’m learning enough. I’m consistently embarrassed. And, I still try to do five minutes a day. I have more than five minutes a day to commit to it, but that five minutes is tough on my emotionally.
Someday, I’ll be able to rewrite this blog post in Italian. That would be cool. Hardly anyone will be able to read it though. And, I can already hear my nonexistent critics whispering, should have taken Spanish.