Yesterday’s post about Ecco Italia’s lingerie night, where they take women (only) to a boutique and teach them what Italians might call each of the flimsy objects on the rack, got me excited thinking about ways to learn a language.
I’m a visual learner. At least that’s what Martha asserts, and she’s a teacher. It’s true that I seem to learn a language faster while I’m seeing it in action—or at least forming vivid and sometimes lascivious images in my head.
Sitting at the University for Foreigners in Perugia and trying the classroom approach for a month crammed a lot of words into me—many of which I’ve forgotten, even though I make frequent trips to Italy and have to use Italian with all my neighbors—but I don’t feel as fluent as I should. What I crave is the Ecco Italia type of experience, of going out and seeing what people are talking about (slowly) so that I can naturally associate objects with the appropriate words without translating them in my head.
I remember the PBS series “French in Action.” It featured a fine young French woman and the bumbling American who was supposed to be nurturing a relationship with her. I actually enjoyed the show. “Mireille” was the type of young woman who made you hang on every word like it was a gift from the gods. I actually learned some French watching her do what she did in life.
Then again, sometimes it seems to take an event leading to a vivid mental image in order to get foreign words to stick in my head. Like many people, I can study the same words day after day and when someone uses them in a sentence a week later, there I sit, hemming and hawing, trying to recall them.
Yet when I come to a door with the word “spingere” written upon it, I automatically know to push. It’s not that I studied this word day after day until it wormed its way into my unconsciousness—no, I happened to be reeling over yet another blunder: pulling on the handle of an Italian door hard enough to make the tendons in my arm recoil and vibrate like an overstretched rubber band and looking like a complete, broken-down idiot in the process.
So my friend says to me, “ya know, I always remember spingere. It’s what the women in Italian comic book porn always say. In fact, it’s about the only thing.”
Spingere! Spingere! Spingere!
Push yourself to learn a language. It’s good for you. Plus, everything held in low regard by a prudish society can help you achieve fluency: comic books, porn, and dumbed down television shows in French.
Oh, and lingerie, too—if you have someone along who can explain the Italian nuances of all those straps and clasps and things.