Learning a language 2

Tomorrow I’ll have my last Italian lesson.  Altogether there will have been 15 of them.  Friday’s are usually my teacher’s busiest days, but she agreed to see me for an hour in the afternoon.  I feel a little like a therapy patient anxious to squeeze in one more meeting before the sessions end.

I’d asked for a review of something that Italian grammar books refer to as il periodo ipotetico, or hypothetical expressions; for example, “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.”  What in English seems seems straightforward and automatic, in Italian involves variations of the subjunctive and conditional.  I’ve had lessons on this topic in the past, but they hadn’t stuck and I’ve found myself avoiding anything that might end up being a hypothetical statement.  If I sense myself heading down a road that’s going to require what still seems like a complicated combination, I quickly take a detour.  Maybe after this review I’ll be prepared to go ahead and take the direct route.  I'll see how I feel on Saturday when I have dinner again with our friends here.

During these four weeks, meeting most days from 9 to 11, we’ve reviewed the several past tenses, prepositions, the imperative, the subjunctive, direct and indirect pronouns, conjunctions, and other grammar points as they came up.  I’ve written probably 10 or twelve little things meant to work at different kinds of writing -- letters, a short story, a newspaper article, even a recipe.  And we’ve spent a good deal of time just talking -- about Seattle where my teacher and her husband and daughter lived for several years; about travel; about the U.S. elections; about Italian teenagers’ fixation on certain brands like Eastpak backpacks and Franklin & Marshall sweatshirts; and, of course, about Italian politics.

So has my Italian improved?  Yes, I’m pretty sure it has, although it’s hard to tell how much.  I didn’t start out with any kind of benchmark test and I’m not taking one at the end that could provide a comparison.  I do know, though, that I still have quite a bit to learn.