Whose Italian are you learning?

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Buondì.

I don’t ever remember a student of Italian specifying ‘whose’ Italian they wanted to learn, not in nearly twenty-years of owning an Italian langauge school in Italy, along with associated online ‘learn Italian’ businesses such as the club.

Nor do I remember, in those decades of employing Italian language teachers (of greater or lesser experience) any of them making clear ‘whose’ Italian they were teaching, unless they were commenting on regional variations in a sniffy tone: “Well, they do say that in the south of Italy but…”

All the Italian teachers at our school are college graduates, of course. All have some sort of qualification to teach Italian. Some have decades of experience, some are just starting out.

So ‘whose’ Italian are they teaching, and therefore – by definition – the students are hopefully learning?

(Though evidently teaching and learning are not synchronous processes, despite most of those involved assuming otherwise.)

A typical Italian language teacher teaches the Italian they were taught at middle school and high school, that’s to say ‘correct’ Italian. That’s what they were taught, and that’s what they’re going to teach in their turn. It’s the nature of the beast.

The subject ‘Italiano’ at Italian state schools (I have three now-adult kids who suffered through them, so feel entitled to an opinion) is a blend of cultural-brainwashing (‘our’ writers, poets, etc.) – which has the function of ‘unifying’ Italia, a country which has existed for less than two hundred years – and the pre-radio/television-era necessity of ensuring that as many citizens as possible could communicate with each other, no matter which dialect they were brought up with.

The French went through this process during the Napoleonic wars (conscription, standardising ‘French’, eliminating dialects), the British perhaps a century later during World War One, and everyone on the planet with access to a TV from the ‘fifties and ‘sixties onwards.

Modern humans learn culture, which includes language, from their immediate families, from their peers, and from a variety of electronic boxes. Because of the latter, they speak increasingly standardised versions of their national language or languages.

Nevertheless, ‘Italian’ teachers in Italian state schools continue with their brainwashing, because that’s what and how they ‘learnt’ at school and they can’t imagine, or aren’t permitted to try, anything different. The one constant in Italian schools and universities is that things never get ‘better’. Many stakeholders find that reassuring, parents and kids less so.

Polemic over. Here are a couple of quotes for you:

“L’Italia resta indietro, e lo è di molto, guardando al livello di istruzione… il nostro Paese è al penultimo posto Ue per quota di 25-34enni in possesso di un titolo di studio terziario (diploma di tecnico superiore, diploma accademico, laurea o dottorato di ricerca)… In Italia, nel 2021, i 30-34enni in possesso di un titolo di studio terziario sono il 26,8%, una percentuale nettamente inferiore alla media Ue27, che raggiunge il 41,6%.”

(Summary: Italy is in last place amongst E.U. countries for the number of 25-34 year olds with college degrees or equivalent. In 2021 only 27% of Italians were qualified to that level.)

Source: https://www.istat.it/news-dati-alla-mano/laureati-italiani-permane-il-divario-con-lue/

But college degrees? Who needs one, if you have a decent high-school diploma, so ‘correct’ Italian, plus an enthusiasm for Dante?

“In Italia, nel 2023, il 65,5% dei 25-64enni ha almeno un titolo di studio secondario superiore, quota in crescita di 2,5 punti percentuali rispetto al 2022 (63.0%). Il valore, simile a quello spagnolo (64,2%), resta decisamente inferiore al tedesco (83,1%), al francese (83,7%) e a quello medio Ue27 (79,8%).”

(Summary: only 65% of Italians have a high-school diploma, which isn’t very good.)

Source: https://www.istat.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/REPORT-livelli-istruzione.pdf

Whose Italian are you learning?

The Italian that junior-high school Italian teachers think is indispensible, for getting a job in your turn as a junior-high school Italian teacher?

But the thirty-five percent of Italians who didn’t get their high-school diploma might speak a different form of Italian, if for no other reason than that they perhaps rarely read or write anything lengthy or formal, and avoid literature like the plague.

That’s probably true too for the additional thirty-eight percent of Italians – totalling SEVENTY-THREE percent of the whole population – with no college degree (see above to check my math). They scraped through their diplomas, but were so nauseated with the brainwashing and Dante that they opted to toil on a factory floor, or live for free in mom and dad’s spare room supported by grandpa’s over-generous pension.

The Italian your Italian teacher teaches you is likely the Italian of the 27% with college degrees, probably not even that many, given all the tales we hear about how college students never read a book these days (as we did) and get A.I. to write their essays and projects for them (as we sadly couldn’t.)

But let’s be generous and say a quarter of Italians speak ‘proper’ Italian – one in four, for those who preferred grammar rules to basic math.

While all the rest, that’s to say three times as many, were made to feel inferior at school and so, unsurprisingly, said ‘to hell with it’.

Whose Italian are you learning?

Remember the snotty school teacher who insisted you use ‘whom’ even though no one you knew did, and who humiliated you for asking ‘Can I go to the toilet, Miss?’ rather than ‘May I..’.

Hers.

And it usually is a her. Well-educated Italian males have better career prospects than spending a lifetime force-feeding Italian grammar and literature to bored teenagers. Besides, the hours of the school day are very convenient if you’re the mother of a young family…

Which brings me to last week’s article, Fancy becoming an Italian citizen?, and specifically to the comments, which you can read on the website but which I’ll reproduce here anyway:

Patricia says:
Ciao Daniel, Your article today was interesting because you laid out the real details of attaining Italian citizenship, which two of my friends have done. But I came to an abrupt stop when I read that you refuse to use the subjunctive! Could you please write more about that and about any other parts of speech you can get along in Italian without. I’m in awe of the possibility. Thank you

Daniel says:
Maybe I’ll tackle the topic next week, Patricia, but the gist of it is that as I listen to Italians speaking Italian every day, but rarely hear the subjunctive used, and as it’s famous as a ‘marker’ used by the ‘in-group’ to self identify (as, for instance, having the right accent used to be in British English), I feel totally free to ignore it.

When I then visit an Italian class and hear our teachers drilling it into their poor students as being the ‘right’ way to speak Italian, it comes as quite a shock. There’s no ‘right’ way to speak any language, just the way that most people do it, and like any organic system (think human genes, for example, or gut flora) what may seem identical across a population inevitably varies from person to person.

We accept that people’s accents vary, and that their vocabularies will be different (i.e. a teacher and a banker), so why should we insist that people learn/use the same grammar? It’s nonsense, of course, but keeps Italian teachers in work.

Patricia says:
Thanks Daniel. Your reply made me laugh out loud and lets me ignore the subjunctive. It turns up in books all the time.

Alison says:
I love your blogs Daniel and, like you, I am not a grammar fan and I do struggle with the congiuntivo…. I am not sure if posting external links in comments is allowed but here goes anyway. I don’t know if you know this song but it amused me.
Lorenzo Baglioni – Il Congiuntivo (Sanremo 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bfYQZPLCEA

Daniel says:
Useful to read the comments below the video to see what Italians really think… Someone wrote, for example, “I haven’t heard all these subjunctives used for years” (my translation), and multiple others remembered being taught the forms at school. Like most other things taught in school, they were quickly forgotten it seems…

Susie says:
I had the same reaction as Patricia when I read about your avoidance of the subjunctive. Yes, please do write more about it next week Daniel!

Which I now have.

If you want to perfect your junior-high-school-teacher’s Italian, then I guess you already know how. Lots of memorising will be involved, lots of testing, too. Enjoy.

But if you’d rather just get più o meno proficient in ordinary people’s Italian – which is what I did, and do with my other foreign languages – then focus not on rules but on getting lots of input (texts, audio). And on getting as much practice interacting with real people as possible.

If the real people you’re interacting with (please, not JUST Italian teachers) can mostly get by with just three tenses (presente, passato prossimo, imperfetto), then I’d strongly suggest that you do the same. Ignore the rest until another lifetime.

Which reminds me… Sometimes ignoring grammar ‘rules’ can make learning said grammar even easier, promise! Learn the grammar if you must. Ignore the rules.

Here’s an example of how, taken from two-year old Bug’s favourite book ‘Bobo e il palloncini’ (Bobo and the balloons) pp. 1-4, published by La Sorgente – Milano in 1986:

Bobo adorava i palloncini. – Dammi il più grosso che hai – diceva sempre all’omino del parco.

(picture of Bobo asking the old guy balloon seller in the park for his biggest)

N.b. the -ava/eva suffix is the imperfetto, mentioned above as one of the three key tenses you should know. The Vs make it piss-easy (pardon my French) to recognise when you read or hear it, so consequently easy to learn and use in speech or writing. The meaning is approximately ‘used to do’, which you could have easily figured out from the context. There’s also a super-easy, super-useful example of the imperative. You really don’t need any rules to figure out that ‘Dammi’ equals ‘gimme’.

I’ll skip p.2, but basically the old guy says that for little fella like Bobo (or Bug) such a large balloon would be dangerous. But Bobo doesn’t care, so…

…un giorno volle un palloncino così gross che non appena prese il filo dalla mano dell’omino i suoi piedi si staccarono da terra.

(picture shows Bobo holding an enormous red balloon, and looking down at his feet, which have ‘become detatched from the ground’)

So ‘volle’? So ‘prese’?

Those are examples of the ‘passato remoto’ which is used in speech only in those parts of Italy that junior-high Italian teachers look down their noses at, never in classier places like Bologna.

Have a wild guess? ‘volle’ could be ‘he wanted’ or similar? Perhaps it’s the passato removo for Volere, who knows.

And ‘prese’, well ‘he took’ the string of the enormous balloon from the man’s hand. You can see that in the picture, or at least, I can.

You’ll see these weird past forms all the time in narratives, such as detective stories or what have you. Keep turning the pages to find out who poisoned the billionaire and you’ll read hundreds, perhaps thousands of examples. And narratives tend to be written in the third person, so he did/she did, which makes it easy.

Do I ‘know’ the passato remoto narrative tense? Totally not, I ignore it, like the ‘congiuntivo’ (subjunctive).

Do I have any problem reading trashy novels? Also totally not.

Took about five minutes to figure out what was going on, by a process of elimination (not presente, not passato prossimo, not imperfetto, must be passato remoto) and to notice some potentially confusing regularities, also illustrated by the Bobo text:

Poi guardò giu

(picture of Bobo holding the ballon and looking down at the increasingly small buildings far below) and…

“In fondo è divertente” pensò Bobo.

(“This is actually quite fun” Bobo thought.)

Present tense first person verbs, as all beginning Italian students soon discover, end in -o.

Vado (I go), voglio (I want), capisco (I understand), and so on.

But this – that’s to say the third-person narrative events, rather than Bobo’s actual words and thoughts – isn’t present. Obviously.

So the -o ending in the present is switched from first to third person in the passato remoto (narrative past tense):

Poi guardò giu

(= Then he looked down)

“In fondo è divertente” pensò Bobo.

(= “This is actually quite fun” Bobo thought.)

How do we know that it’s not first person present?

Well it’s totally obvious from the story, for one thing. Bobo did this, Bobo thought that. But also there’s the accented ò, which gives it away.

Took me about five minutes of reading a detective novel, twenty-five years ago (before Amazon), to figure that out.

Or ask a junior-high school Italian teacher and waste months or years of your life learning it ‘properly’, which’ll be handy if you ever decide to write novels in Italian…

Gotta go. Dishes to wash, while listening to Swedish. Then a thirty-minute online chat with my Swedish conversation partner.

I’ve said this a thousand times, a thousand and one counting today: interaction with real people is the thing that’ll really learn you Italian. All the better if you’re interacting with one of the not-snotty seven-three percent (grannies in the park are a good bet…)

But needs must. See the details below of next week’s FREE online lesson promotion.

Don’t waste yours on grammar. Get the online teacher chatting. Make friends. Have fun!

Figure the grammar out on your own, or ignore it.

Alla prossima settimana!

N.b. To comment on this article, visit the article page on the website (https://onlineitalianclub.com/whose-italian-are-you-learning/) and scroll down to the comments box at the bottom. There’s a more detailed explanation on the club’s FAQ page, down there, where it says: How can I comment on an article? All genuine comments will be published. But be patient, as I only look at incoming comments every tot hours.

Next week is the FREE TRIAL ONLINE LESSON OFFER

NEXT WEEK, not today, so please don’t write to ask how to get your free 30-minutes one-to-one with a native-speaker teacher.

You can read more about it here: https://nativespeakerteachers.com/next-week-were-giving-away-150-free-online-lessons-5/

And there’s a link to get on their mailing list in the sidebar of that website.

The FTLO promo starts MONDAY November 3rd.

P.S.

And here’s a 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.

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