Last May, I decided to learn how to speak Italian for travel. The last time I went to Italy was in 2019, and I got the opportunity to go thanks to my job. I think I found out I would be able to go about a week before the actual trip, so I basically only had the time to brush up on survival phrases before going. Nevertheless, I had a few tiny exchanges with the locals in Italian that were not entirely embarrassing, and I even gave someone directions in the metro.

(I gave this person directions. I’m not sure if they were the right ones…)

In anticipation of another trip to Italy, I started studying Italian for the purpose of speaking it, and I have put fairly consistent effort into it. And starting in mid-August or so, I have had at least one hour (sometimes many more) in a conversation or lesson conducted in Italian.

Learning a language as an adult has made me think back to earlier experiences with learning languages: what worked, what activities were helpful, and what were the biggest challenges. Even though I’m convinced that the classroom approach is fairly inefficient in teaching students to speak languages, I think that it is an amazing gift to have the opportunity to learn a foreign language (and hopefully a bit about another culture) in school.

Grade School

In grade school, we had Spanish as our second language, and despite being a diligent student (who loved school!), I still did not emerge from that experience with anything more than basic recognition of the limited vocabulary we learned. I understood the concept of conjugation, but did not have anything that I could really use beyond the most basic interactions; e.g., where is the bathroom, introductions, and the like. If I had to guess, we probably emerged at an A2 level at best. Additionally, the class was not more than 2 or 3 times a week. And as for instruction, I think the teacher found the class as painful as we did.

High School

In high school, I had the option of taking Latin, German, French, or Spanish. Just the idea of being able to choose my language made it immediately more attractive to me. I chose French. I’m sad to say that’s probably because I was trying to be cool and cultured, and to be different from my friends who chose Spanish and Latin because they were considered to be more useful. (At the time, I did not know that I would become an Eighteenth-Century English Literature student later on, and obviously, having a strong background in French was extremely useful in my studies.)

Despite the dark origins of my choice to study French, I did pretty well at it, and was lucky to have strong teachers throughout my four years of high school. In my fourth year of French, were able to get to the point of reading full works like Le Petit Prince, Le Cid, and L’Étranger and watching movies like Danton. As I write this, I think it’s relatively impressive that a regular old French 4 class could get high school students engaging with such material. In fact, sometimes I read the essays I wrote in high school and genuinely wonder, “Who wrote this?”

In any case, to top of the great experience I had with French, I got inducted into the French Honors Society, which is the only academic honor I’ve ever received that I actually treasure.

College

Sadly, I let grades get in the way of pursuing a minor in French in college. I took one semester with a professor who was the caricature of a rude French person and who would randomly lose our papers. Sadly, it looked like she was the only professor teaching it the next semester, and so I said an old-fashioned Midwestern “yeah no” to that, and ended my college language-learning career by taking my sole required semester of French.

I had to resurrect my French a little bit later on when I took a few classes on Eighteenth-Century literature and found it useful to refer to French novels in the original. But that was pretty much it of French language lessons in an academic setting.

(That was not the end of my adventures with the French language. Shortly after graduating, I worked at a magazine that got an exclusive interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy, and I got to use my French to discover that he’s as disappointing in his own language as he is in translation.)

In my junior year of college, I started to get interested in opera since we were basically forced to watch Le Nozze di Figaro in an Eighteenth-Century Literature class (we watched it after reading Le Mariage de Figaro, which was not as enjoyable). I happened to take the summer between junior and senior year off since I had been working or interning every summer of college, and I knew I would not have time off after graduating in January since I’d be working (thankfully that assumption panned out…). During that summer off, I perfected my fish-cooking techniques, listened to a lot of opera, and studied Italian grammar. I would say I still couldn’t really use it to do anything substantial, but I could start to understand some parts of arias without surtitles. I had an “easy” time learning some of the grammar because I had a lot of material to use for “input”: operas, interviews with opera singers, articles about opera.

Nevertheless, I was too inexperienced with speaking the language (and also completely star struck) to muster up enough Italian when I met my favorite singer, Mirella Freni, in DC when she was performing at the Kennedy Center.

Graduate School

I went to graduate school for a Ph.D. in English, and our language requirement was to show proficiency by either passing translation exams in two languages or passing one literature class in a foreign language. Makes sense, right?

No it doesn’t.

But anyways, I decided to take the path of least resistance and took the French exam and the Italian exam based on very loose reasoning (Beaumarchais and Goldoni were very important to my research, mm-hm). Thankfully, the university had an Italian course for reading/translation so that helped a lot in picking up the rest of the grammar I needed to pass the exam. (It also helped my sanity to have a class where there were really easy right and wrong answers.) But since the course was conducted in English to all grad students who were just looking to pass the test, it didn’t help me improve my speaking skills.

NB: I should have taken Latin for my course of study since I was doing a lot of work on English satire, but there was basically no way I was going to get up early to take Latin I five times a week with undergrads. I told myself that would happen once I got to my 11th year of dissertating but I peaced out of grad school before that time.

Oh and Then There’s Filipino

I’m a first-generation Filipina-American, and I sure as heck am not fluent in Tagalog. I have enough to get around and ask for food, which honestly, is kind of a lot, but when I chance to meet white people who did missionary work in the Philippines, I just ready a cheery “Oh, haha, konti lang!” when they ask in Tagolog if I speak Tagolog.

Lessons Learned

Looking back, I can see a few patterns and lessons that make me wish I reflected on this earlier. These are the most important things I’ve realized:

1. I let weak teachers throw me off course too much. Of course, it wasn’t just the teachers, but in college, when I didn’t have any choice but to take the class with this teacher, I basically let that put me off going further with French when I could have just revisited it at a later semester. And of course I had different priorities at the time, and so many other things to learn, but that’s unfortunate because I might have chosen a different course of graduate study if I had stronger skills with French.
2. Many people don’t learn to speak a language or “use” it in many American high schools and grade schools. However, the book learning and grammar that we might have learned by drilling (or fear of failing a test) can be useful later on in our language learning efforts.
3. Having interesting material at hand will fast-track your learning because the best way to learn vocabulary is in context rather than via lists. This is such a commonplace thing to say these days, but back when I was learning, there wasn’t an incredible amount of accessible, fun, and interesting content online.

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