Giovanni, Marcel, Pepe, and William

For the past few days I've felt Italian.  I sometimes feel like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve:  If it's Sunday, I must be Giovanni; if it's Tuesday, I'm Marcel; Wednesday? Pepe.  Last week I felt overwhelmingly French, and the week before I was a dashing caballero, only without the cool hat and a horse.  For the most part this posturing is harmless (at least I'd like to think so--others might say I'm losing it.), but I'm not sure it's good for my language-learning aspirations.  Since I'm Italian today and was also yesterday, I've been trying to prepare myself for some real face-to-face conversations with genuine Italians.  I've been writing pen-pals from Italy and most of them are at best tepid about just writing emails and exchanging corrected text--they want to do what Italians do best: parlare.  I mean really, if they can be courageous enough to risk making a fool of themselves, why shouldn't I be equally willing?  Seeing as how I also want to parlare, the side-effects of all this language-hopping, though, is confusion.  Yesterday, I found myself repeatedly mixing parlare with hablar (I'm also dabbling (or perhaps babbling) in Spanish)), and even the French parler.  As I'm already self-conscious about speaking any of these languages in public, it won't do to mix entirely different Romance languages while I'm skyping with an Italian conversation partner.  She will surely think I'm coucou--that's a French word that I learned from one of my pen-pals from France.  When she first used the word, I thought she was on to me and was assuring me that I'm crazy as a cuckoo, but when I Googled it, I discovered with relief that it's the latest texting-talk greeting, originally used with children--kind of like peek-a-boo--and is a sort of a cutesy way to say hi.  But I digress.

One thing's for sure, of the three languages, I'm least proficient in Italian.  I have absorbed the requisite grammar and vocabulary, or at least most of it, but it still sounds 'foreign' when I hear or speak it.  After decades of studying French, when I hear it spoken or when I speak it aloud, it feels relatively familiar.  Spanish also--presumably from having lived and worked in New York City for several years and hearing it spoken practically every day.  Italian, though, still sounds new on my tongue--even though the taste of it is molto delizioso.  What does this tell me?  Of course, I need to immerse myself more in it.  Joanne has to go; I need to focus here.  

One reason for my inconstancy is that there are specific aspects of each language that I like and that are unique to each one.  With French, it's the familiarity I spoke of above.  It's sort of become a part of me.  On the other hand, oddly, I find that the more I'm exposed to French, the less I like it.  There are certain puckered-up (can't think of a better word) sounds that make me cringe.  Spanish, en la otra mano, dazzles me with its logical grammar and conciseness, and the word for butterfly, mariposa, is more beautiful than in any other language I know of.  And Italian!  Italian not only has sonorous, vowel-rich words, but spoken Italian also has a distinct rhythm to it that is hard to describe.  A lot of it has to do with those double-consonants.  There's a certain endearing quality to the way they pronounce the word for mama, something like MOMMM-ah, though that's doesn't quite capture it.  Think of those old movies that featured Italian-Americans speaking English; it's exaggerated, but it does sort of give the feel of what spoken Italian sounds like.   It's way more than just melodious vowels.

So, I resolve to have a productive day today, shrugging off my polyglot multiple personalities and hunkering down to prepare for the next stage of learning: speaking.  And may you also have una buona giornata, caro lettore.  

 That's Amore.  From Google Images, Scene from A Room with a View.