"If We Work in Tandem..."

Wednesday in Italian class we had what our professoressa Silvia refers to as “Tandem”

A class of high school seniors (or, the Italian equivalent) from a local high school comes to our class and we spend the hour and forty-five minutes speaking in Italian and English. The idea is that they help us with our Italian and we help them with their English.

I was dreading it. I was not in the least bit excited and prepared myself for a very awkward and embarrassing experience while these native teenagers laughed at our incapacity with their language.

But, it actually turned out to be really great! I was in a group of 4 students from my class paired with 2 girls from the Italian class. We spent the first half asking them questions we had prepared in Italian and then talking about ourselves. Half way through, we switched to English, or we were supposed to. But I was shocked at how poor their English was, so we ended up having to speak in Italian just so they could understand our questions.

They’ve apparently been taking English for 8 years…but I felt like we were almost on equal footing with them in terms of our handle on the foreign language. One of the girls HATED English and said it was a very poor school subject for her; she found it very difficult.

Understandable. I’m using my 3 years of knowledge of Spanish to help me along. And there are many cognates in Italian and Spanish and French, etc…But certainly not in English. There are very few English/Italian cognates, and if you only know Italian, I can see how English would be very difficult to learn.

Our language is completely different from other romance languages. There are certain things about English that I think just make more sense. Like not having 6 versions of every single verb depending on who is performing the action. And our lack of reflexive verbs that add little pointless words all over the place that make it unnecessarily clear as to whom you are talking about.

But then I think…well, every other western language seems to have them…so…I guess we ARE the weird ones.

Later in the semester we will be going to their class at their school to do this again. But we’re going on a Saturday.

Because they have school six days a week in Italy.

God bless the USA.