A single small bag that must fit under the seat in front

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Buondì.

A quick one today, as I’m travelling – from Britain back to Bologna, Italy, if you must know.

My flight is with Irish budget airline, Ryanair, who’ll charge extra for just about everything they possibly can, though not yet for use of the onboard toilet as previously mooted by their CEO.

I refuse to pay more for extras, at least with a company that goes out of its way to upset me, so for my return flight my ticket permits me just a ‘single small bag that must fit under the seat in front’.

Cramming it with with second-hand books, soiled undergarments, computer, smartphone, and the cables and adaptors necessary when travelling abroad isn’t easy, but traveling so lightly is kind of liberating.

Talking of books, a peripheral goal for my trip, the main purpose of which was to see my aged parents, was to get a copy of the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, ‘The Mirror & the Light’.

They have it at my local library in Bologna, but it’s a huge read, approximately a thousand pages, and what with work and Bug-minding duties, that would take me more than the permitted four-week loan time. They have an online service, but the time allowed to read a thousand-page ebook is just two weeks, which I’d never manage in Italian.

I got the first volume in the trilogy the last time I was in the UK, in English, so zipped through its five hundred or so pages in just a few days. Having enjoyed that one, I borrowed the second volume, in Italian, from the library.

Henry VIII, one of the principal characters in the tale, is ‘Enrico’ in Italian, and the Italian dialogues felt more typical of a historical novel than Mantel’s clever English phrasing. But all good – it was a page turner too, even in Italian.

So I was pleased when I walked into a charity shop in Truro the other day (that would be a thrift shop in the USA?) and saw the final volume prominently displayed, and priced at just £3.99 to boot (about five US dollars).

The only trouble? It’s a hardback, so enormous, and takes up half the volume of my ‘single small bag’. True, I could have spent the same amount to buy the ebook version from Google Books and read it on my phone – which I’m fine with –  then fill my pack with teabags, instead. But the local hospice, or whoever runs the thrift store, doubtless needs my cash more than Google does. And ‘real’ books look nice on a shelf.

Anyway, the point of the above is to introduce the topic of reading a book written in your native tongue vs. reading in a foreign language.

My wife (Stefi, who runs our Italian language school) reads a lot in English, more so than in Italian or Swedish, her two mother tongues. Why? I suppose just because most of her favourite authors write in English, and she’s in the habit of it, having done it most of her adult life (we met in London in the ‘nineties.)

I’d say she’s pretty rare, though, even amongst people who are near-native-speaker level in a foreign language or languages. Unless you’re really used to it, reading in the foreign language is always going to be harder, and likely much slower, than reading in your mother tongue.

Either you’re willing to put up with that or you aren’t, but you can always console yourself that while a foreign language book might take three times as long (or more) to finish, it’ll be doing you good in terms of language-learning.

Reading in your foreign language, even if you understand much less that way, exposes you to a vast amount of new vocabulary (a lot of which you won’t know – but just chill about that) and gives you loads of examples of the typical grammar structures used in narratives.

For instance, the Italian ‘passato remoto’, which is barely used in speech (it’s not standard in spoken Italian, though you hear it in certain regions) but is ubiquitous in fiction. Read a few pages of a novel and you’ll figure it out easily enough. If you’re not going to use it in speech, a casual knowledge of the tense, picked up from reading ‘gialli’, is all you’ll really need.

Reading a book, once you get the knack of it, gives you the sort of familiarity with your foreign language that courses, text books and apps often cannot, assuming you’re reading appropriately. If nothing else, it gives you a feel for the language, and helps you know what’s important, and what isn’t.

Not read a novel in a foreign language before? It’s never too soon to try, though obviously the less you know of the language, the harder it will be. To avoid disappointment, manage your expecations before you begin.

I usually advice choosing something ‘light’ and familiar. When I was teaching myself Italian (by reading trashy novels) more than twenty-five years ago I read plenty of translated John Grishams. No offence intended, John.

The trick, by the way, is never to use a dictionary. Most of the words you don’t know won’t be worth the investment of time needed to understand them better, and anyway, there’ll be so many that if you investigate each one you won’t get past the first few pages.

What seems counter-intuitive at first, but works well when you get used to it, is to just keep reading, to just keep turning the pages.

You should feel free to skip the descriptive sections (the many shades of fall colors, the different types of trees, blah blah) but pay attention to the dialogues, and especially to who is doing what to who.

Follow the story as best you can and resist looking things up. Trust me on that, even if it doesn’t feel right at first. Or you won’t get very far.

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HOW TO READ A BOOK IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Choose something ‘light’, that you’ll you enjoy.

‘Read’ it, rather than ‘studying’ it.

Ignore complexity, unless it’s vital to the plot.

Keep turning the pages, until you get to the end.

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Simple as that, really. It’ll probably take a couple of months the first time, which is why it’s important to choose a book you actually want to read, one that’s structured in such a way you’ll feel an urge to find out what happens next (thrillers, romances, etc.)

Oh, and just to say, series are good, as once you’re familiar with the principal characters, the context,and the writer’s/translator’s style, each volume is easier than the last.

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

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