Ascolti! Capisci?

Understand?

Got a message from one of my Italian pen-pals today.  She said she wrote and understood English very well, but had trouble speaking and reading it.  Odd that it's almost just the opposite with me.  I could probably babble my way through a simple Italian conversation (though there would be lots of long pauses) and I can read it with the help of a dictionary, but it's the spoken Italian that I have the most problem with--though not nearly as difficult as spoken French.  This is especially interesting for me in that it seems to me that spoken English is very hard to comprehend.  There's so much slurring and colliding of words--and so many idioms and slang expressions used in a normal English conversation.  I'll have to ask her what her secret is.


Do some people just have more sensitive ears than others?  Can some recognize foreign sounds more easily?  As I've mentioned before, Italian seems to me to be enunciated with clarity and precision, so I've often felt that I'll be quicker in getting to the point where I can understand Italian spoken at a normal pace than either French of Spanish.  There are times when I'm listening to a Spanish or French TV program or film when I feel that I'm not catching a single word the actors have uttered.  Part of this stems from the fact that actors are reciting memorized lines; thus, they may be expressing more complex ideas than people normally would in day-to-day conversation. Perhaps it's better to listen to interviews.  Or, a friend sent me a brief sample of an e-book of The Communist Manifesto in Italian.  Just as he pointed out, so many of the words were anglicized Latin words (a lot of words ending in 'tion') that it gave the impression of being very easy to understand the gist of the book.

Any language is easier to read than to speak, in my opinion.  And most are easier to write, with the exception of  graphic-styled languages such as Chinese or Hindi.  So, in the meantime, I'll keep listening.  ...and I'll keep writing.

A presto...