A white horse walks into a bar

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Buondì.

Someone wrote in last week with a correction to one of our sixty Italian dialogues, which he said he found very useful, though the audio wasn’t the best.

I made the correction, wrote back to thank him, and agreed that the audio was weak. That material was created ten years ago, by interns. We’ve improved a lot since then, but free materials for learning Italian are free materials for learning Italian, dodgy audio or not.

If there were sites out there with sixty free dialogues in the languages I’m learning, I’d use them. For the listening practice particularly, rather than as a source of new vocabulary or grammar structures.

You can never have too much listening practice: listening comprehension is fundamental to spoken interaction, as well as to consuming media. Without strong listening comprehension skills, you’re lost, however great your grammar and your accent, however extensive your vocabulary.

If it was me learning Italian, I’d be making sure my study sessions were a mix of different things. Some grammar perhaps, but also listening (A1 | A2 | B1 | B2 | C1 | C2), perhaps a chapter of an ‘easy reader’ (A1 | A1/A2 | A2 | A2/B1 | B1 | B1/B2 | B2 | B2/C1 | C1 | C1/C2 | C2), and ideally practice interacting with a native speaker.

Though obviously, I’m old-fashioned. There’s likely an app that includes all that stuff, which would get me from zero to hero in no time at all, results guaranteed or my money back.

Which reminds me, I keep hearing that AI – artificial intelligence – is the future!

Our websites have always attracted bucket loads of computer-generated spam comments, which have to be manually reviewed and deleted – something I do multiple times a day, every day – so as not to throw out the baby (the very occasional genunine comment and/or product review) with the bathwater (the flood of automated crap promoting unsavory things I wouldn’t want you to see.)

But recently I’ve also been seeing AI-generated spam comments which, honestly, I can’t see the commercial logic for. I wish I’d kept one for you to read, but I deleted the most recent ones while eating breakfast and before starting this article. Sorry!

Anyway, how it works is, I send out a (commercial but not spammy) article entitled something like “Free one-to-one online lesson offer ends tomorrow night” (that was Sunday, the offer’s now ended, don’t write in), and back comes an automated tidal wave of completely irrelevant comments, containing links to cryptocurrency exchanges, impotency product vendors and the like, along with one that stands out as actually being relevant to my article, though apparently written by a drunken twelve-year-old.

Someone out there is using A.I. to generate automated comments that try to be relevant to whatever has been most recently posted on a website, so as to help you get rich quick or overcome your erectile dysfunction.

Cool idea, except it seems that getting a large-language model to actually write or speak like a person isn’t so easy, despite all the hype. Natural language is far, far more complex than the stuff that AI is currently able to generate, and the grammar + vocabulary + pronunciation + basic skills packages that language schools (and the better sites/apps etc.) will try to sell you.

For instance, jokes. Now, I’m married to an Italian, and in the first days of our relationship, a long, long time ago, it was evident from her puzzled expression and barely concealed irritation that she didn’t get the point of sitting at a table in a pub exchanging jokes like the one below, which I’ve known in various forms since before I was old enough to drink, and found again for you on this Quora page (their errors, not mine):

A horse walk’s into a pub & asks for a pint of beer, the landlord says “that will be £15 please”. The horse pays & then trots over to a table & sits down. The landlord walks over & says “well this is a strange occurance, we haven’t had any horses in here before”. The horse replies “at £15 a pint I’m not surprised”.

“But why is that funny?” my future wife would ask. Which is a good question, actually. Here’s another:

A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar. The barman looks up and says, “What is this, a joke?”

And

A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk into a bar. “What are you doing here?” says the barman to the rabbit. “Don’t know” it says, “probably a spell check mistake”.

(All three came from the same Quora page.)

It’s not about the joke so much, I’d tell her. It’s more a sort of game, a play on your expectations, which can be confounded or confirmed in different, unexpected ways. It’s difficult to explain, though this long article tries.

To be entirely fair to Stefi (meet her at our Italian school in Bologna), she’s a lot better with TV humour. We’re currently watching ‘Young Sheldon’ each evening, as a way of calming down two-year-old Bug and hopefully lulling him to sleep. If you don’t have Netflix, there’s a video of clips from the series here.

“But that’s in English”, you splutter. True. So here’s a different set of clips but in italiano.

Don’t be surprised if you “don’t understand anything”, though. It takes hundreds, probably thousands, possibly tens of thousands of hours of listening ‘practice’ to get you to the point at which you’ll appreciate the humour as immediately and completely as the Italian native speaker sitting next to you on the ‘divano’. Stefi’s English was already excellent when I met her, but there was a lot she didn’t get. My Italian is still execrable even now, but I don’t much mind whether we watch ‘Young Sheldon’ in Italian or English (she prefers English.)

Not understanding everything is normal, even for the most advanced learners. Not understanding anything, on the other hand, is rare, I promise you. You may FEEL that you aren’t understanding anything, but given enough exposure (‘Young Sheldon’ is seven seasons long) you’ll know who the characters are, become familiar with their motivations and typical behaviours, and thus will find it progressively easier and easier to follow what’s going on.

The key word above is ‘exposure’. Think about it. TV series, if you can get your hands on them, are ace for language-learning.

Take another look at the English version of the Young Sheldon clip, and as you do, evaluate how complex the language used is, the dozens of tense forms, the conditionals, the register and so on. Not so much, actually. You’ll find the dialogues are really quite simple from a grammatical point of view, though loaded with references that require ‘cultural knowledge’ to understand (how the U.S. education system works, the nature of miracles, etc.)

Gird your loins now, and knowing full well that you “won’t understand everything”, watch the Italian clip, focusing this time not on the speech, but on the characters and events – who’s who, where are they, what are they doing, what’s incongruous? Ignore the speech, but – if asked – could you give a rough summary of what you’ve watched?

How to get from ‘here’ (“not understanding anything”) to there (immediate appreciation of the subtleties of the dialogue)?

Here’s another joke, from the website of the famous New York music venue, Carnegie Hall:

A pedestrian on 57th Street sees a musician getting out of a cab and asks, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Without pause, the artist replies wearily, “Practice.”

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

And here’s my weekly reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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