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I went abroad for Sunday lunch

May 29, 2023 By Daniel Leave a Comment

Buondì.

Being a Brit, going abroad always used to seem like a major undertaking. When I was a kid, it involved getting on a cross-channel ferry to reach France the next day. Once we drove as far as the Alps, another time to someplace in Spain.

Obviously things have got a lot easier with low-cost carriers and the like, though from what I’ve read in the newspapers things can still be complicated, with flights cancelled, electronic passport gates malfunctioning, and train strikes. Maybe better to stay home?

And living in mainland Europe isn’t necessarily so different. I have an eighty-year-old neighbour who’s never been as far as the sea, a hundred kilometers down the road. And another, much younger family opposite us, who’ve never had a foreign holiday with their now-almost-adult kids.

But those are exceptions. With it’s thousand-year-old university, Bologna has been a destination for foreign travellers almost for as long as it has existed, and the traffic is mostly two-way.

Geography helps. From the nearby Adriatic coast, it’s only an overnight sail to Croatia. Or jump in a car and drive north to easily reach Slovenia, Austria, Lichtenstein (where?), Switzerland, France, or Monaco before stopping for the night.

Trains rumble through Bologna on their way south to Florence, Rome and Naples, but also depart to destinations in northern Italy, and onwards into mainland Europe.

My house is located under the flightpath to Bologna international airport. Some days the planes pass overhead every few minutes so, one way or another, it’s difficult not to be aware that there are lots of other, ‘foreign’ places nearby.

National boundaries are important, but a bit like standing in a line to order lunch, in Europe you can’t be unaware of others around you. In times of war, I guess that can be scary. But there’s also the sense of a shared history and, look back far enough in time, ‘we’ might once have been ‘them’ anyway, given how populations used to move about.

See the thirty chapters of medieval history on the club website for details.

But back to yesterday’s (Sunday’s) lunch. It was my Swedish mother-in-law’s birthday, so we were spending the weekend in Rimini. To avoid the birthday girl having to cook and wash up, a table had been booked for lunch in a restaurant about thirty-minutes drive away.

From the sandy beaches of the Adriatic, the road took us inland, more or less south-west towards the Apennines, destination San Marino, yet another of Europe’s independent statelets.

I picked up a brochure/tourist map for you. It has ‘Repubblica di San Marino, Oltre ogni immaginazione‘ emblazoned on it, next to a logo that reminded me of a porcupine experiencing a severe indigestion attack.

But the copy I got for you is in English, so at the top, in a white font across a blue sky, it has the slogan ‘Come and discover a world like no other‘, and below that an unimpressive-looking tower and what looks like a few ruins in an olive grove.

Lascia stare the brochure, I’ll paint you a picture with words instead. Think a mountain, big enough to be seen from twenty miles away, with medieval towers placed along a ridge at the top, and a city-full of tax evaders huddled on its lower slopes. You’ll get the general idea.

The Riminesi don’t have a high opinion of their independent republic neighbours, who clog up the streets in their flash cars with foreign number plates, watch Italian TV without paying the licence fee, and make free use of Rimini’s hospitals. That’s what my father-in-law complains of, anyway.

My wife adds, sourly, that the San Marino Republic pays university fees for the children of its citizens wherever they choose to go to study in Italy (though university in Italy is cheap anyway.)

And I’d personally grouch that you should never do business with someone from San Marino as they’ll feel totally free not to pay you, given that their business is outside the jurisdiction of the (admittedly horribly-inefficient) Italian courts.

Neither should you marry someone from there, for while your children will be born lucky citizens of a tax haven, you’ll never be allowed to naturalise, yourself.

Drive round and round the moutain, ever upwards, and the tax-free electronic goods stores and shamelessly-cheap gas stations are soon left behind, as the landscape becomes more like that in the brochure – cliffs, olive trees, and ruins.

Keep driving up and you’ll eventually reach a necklace of coach parks garlanding the moutain-top old town – the afore-mentioned towers, a mass of tourist tat shops, and picturesque streets filled with pizzerias of dubious reputation.

If you ever went to Mont Saint-Michel in France, or basically any place that’s a magnet for tourists on bus tours, you’ll already have an idea.

Oh, one interesting thing, though. The traffic cops in San Marino wear yellow gloves, with matching polo shirts. No, really! I took a photo for you, to prove it!

So how was lunch, you might be asking.

Well, the restaurant was just inside the walls, opposite the ‘Torture Museum’, which didn’t bode well…

Neither did the name, ‘Ristorante Bolognese’, which given that they seemed to serve mostly pizza and seafood must have been aspirational rather than descriptive.

Bologna is not famous for either pizza or seafood, so I’m guessing that the naming was done with the idea of communicating, yes we’re independent, no there’s no sales tax, but OK, we see why you might not be convinced about eating here on the top of a mountain, so we’ll market ourselves to remind you of the foodie heaven an hour up the road and see if that grabs you.

Silly name aside, the view across the mountains was fantastic and the staff were charming. Too charming…

I’d decided to try the seafood risotto, but the owner was heart-broken at the idea, visibly upset. I was making a terrible choice! He more or less insisted that I try a seafood pasta dish that he would prepare especially for me! With pasta his mother had made herself, or words to that effect.

It was noisy, I’m a little deaf, and it was obviously bullshit, so I didn’t pay much attention and just gave in. I wasn’t paying, either.

Focaccia was delivered to our table, fresh from the pizza oven, cheap white wine was poured, and after the rigours of our international journey, we began to have fun.

Predictably, when my meal arrived it was not better than ‘OK’ – barely-warm, home-made pasta with seafood fished from the freezer that very morning. I asked the guy who delivered it if he had, in fact, made it himself.

The place was busy and the server/owner looked rather worn out, so it was quite understandable that he’d forgotten what he’d promised someone he’d only spoken to for a few seconds, half an hour previously.

He smiled, assured me he hadn’t cooked it himself, gestured to his expensive shirt as if to say ‘the very idea!’, and wished me ‘bon appetito!’

So there you go. Abroad.

It makes a nice change sometimes, but you can’t trust the locals, if you can even understand them.

Perhaps my neighbours have the right idea.

A mercoledì.

P.S. Half-price ‘Ebook of the Week’ offer!

This week’s half-price ‘Ebook of the Week’ offer is 2 giugno 1946 (level A2/B1) because, well, Friday will be the 2nd of June. So why not?

Though one reason why not is that this one has sold well over the years, meaning virtually all of our regular ebook buyers will have already read it.

Never mind, money isn’t everything. This offer, then, is aimed at new club members, especially women…

Bologna, 2nd of June 1946. Italy is slowly recovering from the devastating effects of World War II. A referendum has been organised to decide whether the reborn state will be a republic or continue as a monarchy. And for the first time in history, Italian women can go to the polls! Newly-wed Marcella is so excited at the prospect she barely slept last night. But her husband, Antonio, is unconvinced…

.pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
.mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
8 chapters to read and listen to
Comprehension questions to check your understanding
Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
Suitable for students at any level
Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Do check out the Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) before you buy a copy. That way, you’ll know whether the level is suitable for you, and that the format works on the device you intend to use it on.

Until Sunday 4 giugno, 2 giugno 1946 is 50% discounted, so just £5.99 rather than the usual ‘easy reader’ ebook price of £7.99.

Buy 2 giugno 1946, just £3.99 | FREE sample chapter (.pdf) | History/historical ‘easy readers’ | Catalog

How do I access my ebook?

When your order is ‘completed’ (normally immediately after your payment), a download link will be automatically emailed to you. It’s valid for 7 days and 3 download attempts so please save a copy of the .pdf ebook in a safe place. Other versions of the ebook, where available, cannot be downloaded but will be emailed to people who request them. There’s a space to do that on the order form – where it says Additional information, Order notes (optional). If you forget, or if you have problems downloading the .pdf, don’t worry! Email us at the address on the website and we’ll help. Also, why not check out our FAQ?

P.P.S.

Don’t forget, either, to read/listen to Saturday’s bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news.

It’s FREE, so what’s to lose? And subscribing is also FREE. Subscribe here.

Last week we began our bi-monthly donations campaign, which ends tomorrow (Tuesday). Though people are welcome to donate at any time, of course. We’ll just stop banging on about it from Wednesday, for a couple of months, at least.

Donations pay for the three Italian-language audio bulletins – with text support – which EasyItalianNews.com publishes each week.

Thanks to the many people who’ve helped, this week and in the past. Without the support of a generous few, the material would not exist.

If you’ve been meaning to send us some cash, but haven’t gotten around to it – donate here.

Grazie di nuovo!

+++

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Learning more than one foreign language at a time

May 26, 2023 By Daniel Leave a Comment

Buondì.

Gotta be brief this morning, as I’m taking my son Tom (voice of EasyItalianNews.com, see today’s P.P.S.) to do the first part of his driving test – the theory exam.

I’m not sure how that works exactly. Whether the stuff that he has to study is all about how to drive as dangerously and ruthlessly as possible, with no regard to anyone’s safety, or if it’s the usual Italian educational approach of memorising everything for months before the test, then wiping all of it from your brain right afterwards, in preparation for the next exam.

Either way, he has to pass the theory before he can get his ‘foglio rosa’ (pink paper), which is the provisional license he needs before climbing into a vehicle and terrorising his parents and fellow citizens. He won’t, of course, know one end of an automobile from another. But he will have stretched his already over-developed memorisation muscles, which are always important here.

Which brings me to Patricia, who emailed this:

Could you write a column re studying more than one language at a time, as you do, please. I speak French and I’m always trying to improve that skill. Since the languages are similar, it makes understanding the structure of Italian easier but, since many words are almost the same, I mix the two languages together and I’d like to keep them separate. Thanks for any help you can give me.

Premesso che (omnipresent Italian legal phrase) I don’t actually study languages, ever, at all, I’m happy to give my two pennies’ worth.

OK then, I get that Pat has a different approach, knows French well, would like to know Italian well, and is presumably applying the same methods she used with French, perhaps at school many years ago, to studying Italian now – hoping for similar results.

And it’s true that the two languages are similar, which is both an advantage but also sometimes a hindrance. For instance, when you have to memorise yet another mass of irregular verb conjugations, and somehow keep them separate from what you already know. Che palle.

You might be reassured to know that both Italians learning Spanish and Spanish speakers learning Italian have this very same problem. Learning each other’s languages is easy, it takes ten minutes flat, but they never stop moaning about how hard it is to keep everything straight. Poverini.

Many club members reading this will be thinking that they wish they had that problem! For an native English-speaker, no foreign language is similar enough to make learning it easy. Europeans are often celebrated as being ‘good’ at languages, but it helps a lot if the new language has similarities or shared roots with your mother tongue, which most of them do. Swedish is similar to Norwegian, and Danish, though completely unlike Finnish, apparently.

Anyone who has tried to learn a really ‘different’ language (Turkish in my case, Japanese for my wife) can attest that it’s much harder when you have to start from scratch, the progress is slow, and the eventual ‘level’ reached likely to be lower. Ma è così.

Back to Pat’s problem, I’d first suggest she define, or redefine, her goal or goals. She should reexamine WHY she’s learning Italian, for a start. Is it for the sheer satisfaction of levering the French to master another, similar language, for instance? In which case, if ‘mastery’ is the goal, then dealing with those irritating similiarities is going to be part of the job, like it or not.

But if her emphasis is on learning Italian so she can use it in some way – to chat, to watch TV, to read novels or newspapers – then that would suggest she should put aside worries about confusing the languages, and begin, as soon as possible, to build the relevant SKILLS.

Skills such as conversation, listening, reading, writing etc. don’t depend on a mastery of the mass of detail that makes up a language, in the same way as Tom learning how to actually drive is largely unconnected with this morning’s theory exam

I don’t usually restate my metaphors, on the grounds that if they aren’t clear to an attentive reader what’s the point of using them.

But this is such a good one, I’ll say it again, in parole semplici, as Italians say.

You can learn every single detail of the highway code in, for example, the USA, and then again in Italy, where you plan to retire (and in Italian, as there isn’t an English version of the test). It’ll take you a while, you’ll learn a lot, and enjoy puzzling over the various differences.

But little of it will be relevant to the actual business of driving in the USA or Italy, which is going to be broadly the same, though with a few readily-apparent differences.

In Italy we don’t (in theory) overtake ‘on the inside’ on our autostrade, which mostly have three lanes, not four like one of those scary American interstates.

See? I didn’t need to read the highway code to know that. Just to get in a hire car, and watch how people in Texas did things. Differently, but it wasn’t hard to see how.

And traffic cops in Italy are both few and far between and, generally-speaking, uninterested in whether you have consumed alcohol, exceeded the speed limit, or otherwise comported yourself in a manner that might elsewhere be considered inconsiderate and dangerous.

Studying it and doing it are different, Pat.

Emphasise the ‘doing’ and your brain will quickly fall into line, keeping the French part in one mental box and the Italian part in another.

Poi, the more listening and reading you do in, say, Italian, the more the details of the language will (unconsciously) be consolidated in your head.

For instance, I live in Italy, so read and hear Italian all the time. I speak it too, sometimes. At least since I had to with Roomie, who had no English.

Most days I also listen to the radio in both Swedish and French. Sometimes I read those languages, too, thanks to my local library granting me free access to international newspapers.

When I have time and energy I might also listen to and read Spanish, or listen to Turkish, or both.

I never speak French, Turkish, or Spanish these days, though I probably could if I needed to. At least a little. Once a week I chat for half an hour in Swedish. Every day I speak Italian and English.

‘Studying’ doesn’t come into it. Neither does ‘mastery’.

These are just things I do, or try to. The patterns change according to my circumstances, time, and motivation, but each particular ‘skill’ (reading in French, reading in Spanish, reading in Swedish, etc.) lives in its own little box in my skull.

Another driving metaphor: when Tom eventually gets his licence, the real one not the foglio rosa, I expect him to be unsafe.

Hence, we just traded our old Chrysler Voyager (2 liter diesel engine, seven seats, impossible to park, illegal in the downtown due to its emissions) for an old Fiat Punto (1.4 liter GPL, small family car), and insured it ‘third party’ only, that which is legally necessary and not a euro more.

The expectation is that he might trash it one night on the way home from a disco. Five grand wasted, but as long as he doesn’t also trash himself or anyone else, I’ll be fine with that.

Hopefully he’ll learn and so one day will be competent, by Italian standards. He’ll probably never be perfect, who is?

Much further on in life, his eyes will start to go and perhaps at some distant future point his license will be revoked due to him becoming excessively doddery. Italy’s roads are no place for the old (see this clip from my morning commute.)

Foreign languages work the same way.

You have to ‘do’ them, not just ‘study’ them. You’ll never be perfect. If you don’t keep using them, they’ll become harder to access, though there’s an element of ‘never forgetting how to ride a bicycle’.

IF I were taking an undergraduate degree right now (attending college, as Americans say), majoring perhaps in two new and unrelated languages – Japanese and Russian, for example – then I would aim to build sustainable ‘study’ regimes, making sure to include plenty of skills work, and not need to worry about confusing the two. Kanji and cyrillic are quite different ways of reading/writing, after all.

IF I were taking an undergraduate degree right now (attending college, as Americans say), majoring perhaps in two related, so similar, languages – Portuguese and Romanian, for example – then I would aim to build sustainable ‘study’ regimes, making sure to include plenty of skills work, and not worry about confusing the two – knowing that I was never going to be perfect at either one, and that things would sort themselves out over time, given enough ‘input’.

Hope that helps, Pat!

A lunedì.

P.S. Il barbiere di Siviglia – 25%, final reminder!

Here’s a final reminder about this week’s new ‘easy reader’ ebook, another title in our series of Italian ‘easy reader’ ebooks based on operas.

This time it’s Rossini’s entertaining comedy Il barbiere di Siviglia and, as always with new publications, it’s 25% discounted for the first seven days (offer ends Sunday 28th May 2023).

We began the ‘opera’ easy reader ebooks series back in the fall of 2022, with a simplified text + audio version of Nabucco, one of composer Verdi’s most famous operas. Next we did Puccini’s romantic classic, Turandot, then another Puccini weepy, La Bohème, returning to Verdi for the final two publications of 2022, Rigoletto and La traviata. In 2023 we’ve published the spectacular Aida, poor Madama Butterfly, and most recently Tosca

Gioacchino Rossini’s famous opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia, was first performed in Rome in 1816.

Beautiful Rosina lives in Seville (Siviglia) with her guardian Don Bartolo. The much older man wants to get his hands on her dowry by marrying her, so keeps her a virtual prisoner. The young, attractive Count of Almaviva also has his eye on Rosina, but isn’t easily able to communicate his interest. Fortunately, clever barber Figaro has some ideas…

Begin with this ‘easy reader’ ebook before watching the actual opera, or simply use this original Italian reading/listening practice material to add a little variety to your study program.

.pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
.mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
8 chapters (based on Rossini’s Act/Scene structure) to read and listen to
Comprehension questions to check your understanding
Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
Suitable for students at pre-intermediate level or above
Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Do check out the Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) before you buy a copy. That way, you’ll know whether the level is suitable for you, and that the format works on the device you intend to use it on.

This being the first week, Il barbiere di Siviglia is 25% discounted, so just £5.99 rather than the usual ‘easy reader’ ebook price of £7.99.

Buy Il barbiere di Siviglia, just £5.99 | FREE sample chapter (.pdf) | Opera ebooks | Catalog

N.b. This is the final publication in our opera series. View them all here.