I have a long history with Italian at this point. I was born to an Italian-American mother, but was adopted, so I had no day-to-day interaction with the language. (For what it’s worth, my brothers and sister have even less, since Italian was not spoken at home, and they never even took a class, whereas I did. Even my mom, though she is full Sicilian, she was born in Detroit and her parents thought it fit to speak only English to the kids. They spoke Sicilian amongst themselves, but not to the kids. So my mom only understood some Sicilian, but couldn’t really speak it.) I probably took my first class over 30 years ago. I got to know my birth family and have visited them in Italy five separate times. Each time I was forced to speak Italian since they don’t speak English. And I’ve tried to maintain some interaction in Italian through the years. At my current job, we have an Italian lawyer working with us. I had hoped I could speak some Italian with her, but since her English is far superior to my Italian, we just end up speaking English all the time. I have, over these years, read some Italian books, and right now I’ve made a list of the most important works of Italian literature, and am trying to read through them. Strangely enough then, reading is, by far, the medium through which I have the most interaction with the language. I can speak it at a low-mid level, but even that would take some period of adjustment, since it’s been over 10 years since I’ve been there. I have run across enough vocab over the years to be absolutely fluent, but the lack of practical use has meant that I retain very little at a recall level for conversation.

Though I will listen to songs and movies in Italian when I can, I’m still relatively deficient in hearing it and comprehending. Even when I know the words, I’ll often not be able to identify them aurally, especially at faster speeds. If a native speaker is clear and speaks at a mid-speed level, I can usually follow most of what is said.  

While I’m a good reader of English, I’m of course much slower in Italian. I can skim over English and easily get what’s being said, but I need to actually read through the Italian word by word, or maybe only lightly skimming, to have it register. And even then, there are times when the structure still demands that I go back and really read it, and even translate it into English, in order to fully make sense of it. Even so, I have read historical Italian, meaning works from the 1600s on, and have been able to pick up on the developments of the language. Older works than that are touch and go. I can read bits of the divine comedy for example, but much will be lost on me. I’ve tried to read Orlando Furioso in the original verse, and the Decameron, but it’s too much of a struggle. Likewise with Benvenuto Celllini’s autobiography. But even with the Prince, written in the 1500s, I can understand enough. Things get easier as they get newer, but even so, I can read stuff from the 1800s with little problem, other than having to look up vocab that I don’t know- which will usually run to an average of 2-3 words per page.

I can, at least I hope, usually get the meaning from the texts too. As deficient as my Italian is, I can still read the story, and get that there are the surface level meanings, as well as the deeper meanings. Sometimes, I need a hint… but that’s true in English too.

One example was in reading Orlando Furioso, which is a classic knight errant tale. In all the fantastic stories, I had not thought of them as symbolic. But one of the cantos started off with the relation that such stories were ‘like’ what we face in real life…. and at that point, with just a slight push in the right direction, I started to look deeper into how those fantastic stories would symbolize struggles that were common to humanity. A story of a knight having a spell cast on him that caused him not to be able to see certain things…. well, who hasn’t been in a situation (perhaps in love, or perhaps so angry) where we weren’t seeing straight? Didn’t it seem like we were blinded? Like we had a spell cast over us? What broke the spell? What caused us to have our eyes suddenly opened?

That’s just one example. With Orlando Furioso, I was fortunate enough to find a modern Italian rewriting. The verse was lost, but at least I could understand it without having to look up so many words that it would have been too time consuming to sort through the original. I would still have recourse to the original, and look at the rhyming verses to see how it was written, but needing to put so much work into just trying to understand the words would have rendered the deeper meanings inaccessible to me.

I keep meaning to take one of the language level tests to ascertain where I am in Italian, but to be honest… I’m kind of afraid of how low I’ll score.