I spent 10 days in Italy, and I still don’t know if "ciao!" means hello or goodbye, or if it’s a word like "aloha" that can mean both.
I assumed that "pronto" means hurry, as in "get your ass into the boss’s office, pronto!" but that doesn’t explain why people answer their cell phone that way.
As far as I’m concerned "prego" is spaghetti sauce, but it seems to be used in Italy as a verb, usually by officers conducting traffic and restaurant waiters.
I made a few feeble attempts to communicate, I feel silly saying things like "bonjourno" and "grazie" because of a lack of confidence in my pronunciation so the words usually come out in a whisper.
As a result I’ve become one of those annoying tourists who try to communicate in simple English with accompanying hand signals, while making wild guesses at what the correct word might be. "Aqua, agua, water," I’ll say, making a sipping motion. "Bathroom, salle de bain, lavatory, toilets, um, toil-ettas" I’ll ask confused Italians who look like they’re in some kind of position of authority because they’re wearing uniforms. I won’t even describe the hand signals I use for that one.
I’ve become a walking thesaurus, blurting out synonym after synonym in the hope that I can find a word in English that sounds enough like its Italian equivalent. Sometimes I’ll go back to the words I learned up to Grade 11 French, which I only passed because I had no intention of taking Grade 12. The teachers at my high school were good like that.
As I sat in the Sestriere media centre, humiliated after my last attempt to communicate with a poor shopkeeper – "just looking? Um, shopping? Um, browsing? Um, browse-ero ?" – I found myself wishing that I had the ability to go back in time and pay closer attention to Madame Baker-Carr, Mr. Mickey, Madame Treffleur and a host of other language teachers I had over the course of my school career. All I can honestly remember from Ms. Baker-Carr’s class was that she was hot.
The problem with our education system is that it’s based on a rigid progression, and the progression relies entirely on your grades. Students learn languages at different speeds, and if you get behind in one lesson, there’s no hope of catching up because the rest of the class never stops moving. By the time you get one thing sorted in your head, you discover that your peers are already light years ahead of you.
I gave up French, math AND science because those marks brought down my average, and I knew my average would determine whether I got into a good university or not. It doesn’t matter that someone who went on to Grade 12 French and got a mark of 50 per cent actually knows more French than I do, what mattered was the fact that I managed to get grades in the 80s and 90s in my ‘safe’ subjects.
I’ve always wanted to pick up where I left off in the subjects I dropped, but without high school I couldn’t get into university level classes, and no college student anywhere has extra time to pick up a few extra high school courses. You get one shot at it, which is a problem.
First of all, I think we teach languages the wrong way. The only way to learn a language is by hearing it and speaking it, not by conjugating endless verbs. Schools turn language into mathematics, when it’s really more of an art.
If I were in charge, French students wouldn’t even look at a French book until they’ve spent 10 years in the classroom speaking and listening to the language. After all, the goal shouldn’t be to write French novels, but for students to be able to get by if they ever spend time in Quebec or France.
Secondly, I don’t think we should even be grading French until Grade 12, and even then students should be able to take the course without getting a GPA-sucking mark. They should be able to go on with those subjects if they choose without being penalized.
Same goes with math and science – I missed out on a lot of good stuff because I didn’t want these subjects to drag on my average.
I have a few friends who have already graduated from university, then went all the way back to high school to pick up some equivalency courses in order to get into the graduate school program of their choice. Or because they finally decided what they wanted to be when they grew up and discovered they needed that Grade 12 physics, calculus and biology.
My brother was one of the worst math students in my high school, at least until I came along, but he ended up taking all kinds of math after graduating university and is now a few courses away from becoming a full-fledged engineer. It was never that he couldn’t do math, just that he couldn’t learn it as quickly as the other students in his Grade 11 class with the distractions of life and a full course load. Maybe I’m the same way.
I don’t claim to be an educational expert, but after high school the opportunities to really learn a language dry up. And most high school students can’t picture a time when they might find themselves in a foreign country, trying to buy a present for their girlfriend with three Italian words at their disposal.
