Learn, Improve, Explore…

When I stepped off the plane in Italy, my vocabulary was limited to “ciao” and “pizza, per favore” and somehow, I managed to get by for my first couple days in the city.  However, I desperately needed a foundation if I wanted to eat something other than Pizza Margherita for my five week stay here!

To be honest, though, while I knew the classes were important if I wanted to learn anything, I was slightly terrified of going to level 1 classes.  What if everyone else was way better at the language than me?  What if I just couldn’t understand the teacher?  What if I physically couldn’t say certain words?  Millions of questions circled through my mind.

My greatest concern though was that I would feel like a complete idiot while sitting in class.  I thought the tendency for teaching elementary level students would be to talk to you like you are a baby in that annoying high pitched voice and kind of wiggle fingers in your face.  Fortunately, my teacher Laura was much more sensitive than that.  The teacher understands that while you can’t speak Italian, you can speak other languages and are a generally competent person.  Therefore, each member in the class was given respect and treated like an adult.  Also, to make everyone forget how silly they sounded trying to say certain words, we played lots of games and when someone made a mistake, Laura would politely correct it but would never single out a certain student.

Class started with the basics: “Hello, my name is”, “Where are you from?”, “How old are you?” and how to respond to those questions.  By forming a circle and passing a bouncy ball between students, a simple Q&A game was facilitated.  The exercise allowed students to repeat the phrases and get used to hearing and speaking Italian in a dynamic way.

Each day, the teacher built on what we had previously learned and by the end of week one, I was able to communicate with my flat mates and landlady in Italian and with a significant amount of hand gesturing (getting pretty good at that, must admit!), I was able to get my general point across to people in stores.

The most important thing about the class for me was that the teacher spoke in Italian the entire time.  While it seemed kind of daunting at first – how could she teach us, with just the Italian language, how to conjugate a verb? – it worked quite well, and we managed to cover a wide variety of grammar topics.  Also, through this full immersion, we were all subconsciously absorbing how to create sentences and picking up the odd word here and there.  It has been a great experience so far and after two weeks, my entire class moved up to level two and are building on the foundation created in the initial level.