Lately, I have spoken with many different people about learning English as opposed to learning Italian. Which is easier? My private lesson student asked me whether I think he could become fluent if he spent a semester or some amount of time in an English speaking country. An American that I met recently who is studying Italian asked me, putting aside how I learned both languages, which do I think is easier overall. I said the same thing to both of them. Italian has many rules. Many, many rules. If you follow them, you will be able to speak. If you learn and study the rules, there is no reason why you won't be able to put together full sentences and conversations. Every letter is pronounced in every word. English, on the other hand, we don't have many rules. Our grammar is pretty simple. We add "will" before the verb for the future, "would" before the verb for the conditional, and hardly consider the subjunctive. We don't have many complicated strict rules to memorize ... yet that just means everything is an exception! Why do we pronounce they're, their and there the same way if they are spelled differently? How come present tense read and past tense read are pronounced differently if they are spelled the same way? Without being in an English speaking country or conversing with a native English speaker ... how could you possibly learn and understand all of these rules? Instead, I can explain every part of a sentence in Italian and why it is so according to which rule.
It's easy to say when you are taking language classes in school, that you've hit a plateau. Now, you just need to go to the country and speak. I think that this is probably true for English. We have such a large vocabulary pronounced all sorts of ways and grammar that is practically only exceptions that by speaking and listening to English, you might be able to pick it up with less study. My experience with Italian has been quite a bit different. After taking French and Latin in high school, I was used to the rules. I understood how to use different tenses by conjugating a verb according to a certain system. I went on a two-week exchange to France and actually spoke a lot of French with my host family in high school. Right away I was able to pick up Italian when I took Elementary at BC. Luckily, I went to Parma for the summer after freshman year and took Intermediate in Italy, only in Italian. I had one year of grammar and I was supposed to start speaking immediately when it took 6 years of grammar to get me conversing with a host family in French? It was hard! I studied abroad for a semester in Parma and spoke with a host family at dinner every night. I wrote in a diary a couple times a week for my Italian teacher to correct - but really since freshman year I've only "reviewed" grammar while writing essays or preparing for a class. Instead, all I do is converse!
I think it is hard to say when you are fluent in a language. There are always new words and expressions to learn. So, I won't say that I am yet fluent in Italian. But, I can speak. My landlady speaks no English, one of my three roommates remembers various English words but doesn't speak it with me. Overall, I can say anything I want. I can make my point and people understand me as I understand them. Yet, I know that I make errors, I have to simplify what I say and sometimes I really have to think about the ending of a complex tense before using it. I don't want to make errors anymore! I don't want to have to simplify what I say and I want to speak in all tenses!!! One of my roommates in particular corrects me by giving me better vocabulary to say what I really intend. I always rush to my room to get out my little red notebook so I can bring it back and copy down the new phrase correctly. She likes to learn the English word equivalent so now when I go to my room she yells for me to also bring my dictionary and we look up different related Italian and English words and phrases. Every once in a while she takes my notebook and tests me on words we've talked about in the past. This is why I wanted to live with Italians. To really be exposed to the language day in and day out. Yet, I feel that I've somewhat hit a conversation plateau. I need to get back to the books! I brought an Italian grammar book and I write down all of these new words, but haven't reviewed the grammar or written my new words in contextual sentences. From now on, I've decided that I have to devote some time to studying Italian traditionally and hit the books, because speaking is not always enough ~
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