Parla italiano?

"So can you speak Italian?!"

That's the first question that the majority of people from home ask any of us when they speak to us for the first time in awhile. And I get it! We've been here for 4 months and one of our big goals was to learn the language while we're here. I know everyone is excited for us and wants to give us an opportunity to show off how much we've learned. Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy I'm afraid.

I think today might be the first day I might be willing to answer "yes" when asked that question. However, it would be followed immediately by "Enough to get by anyway." And sadly, that's about all I've got so far. I can shop ("Vorrei comprare tre bottiglie di vino, per favore.") , send things in the mail ("Inviare questo a California."), tell my kids we're leaving ("Andiamo!")  or to come here (Vieni qui!"). That's great and all and I won't downplay how cool that is. The problem is, I only sort of count it as speaking.

What do I mean by that? Well, sadly after more than 100 days here, we officially have zero friends. That's not to say there aren't, to quote Sesame Street, some people in our neighborhood we know, but, like in the song, they are just the people that we meet each day. We know Ricardo, the wine guy (don't judge!), Paola (our real estate agent/downstairs neighbor), "Cell phone store nice girl who speaks English and other guy who doesn't speak English", "super nice market guy", Daniela and Valentina (the girls' cooking class teachers), and people like that. We are recognized and most of those people have been told our story and know why we're here. But I wouldn't call them "friends".

The reason we don't have any come-on-over-and-have-dinner friends is because, you guessed it, we can't speak to them to make those sorts of connections. For instance, there's a very nice family that lives one floor down from us. The mother seems lovely and the dad is a nice guy. They have a young teenage daughter who would probably get along with our girls well enough. Alas, when I see them I can get as far as "Come stai?"...aaaaaand that's about it. I could even start to ask them where they work or some other super fundamental questions, but as soon as they hit me back with an answer, I'd be at a loss to continue. I just don't have the go-to ability to be able to hold a personal conversation with anyone.

Sometimes even more frustrating than the inability to make friends is the inability to be witty and/or funny, which, for those of you who know me, is something I (try) to do quite frequently. I remember an afternoon I came across two older ladies on the street and I was carrying a couple bottles of wine (I swear it's not all about wine here!) home from the store and one of them rattled something off to me in Italian. I could tell they were being pleasant and making a joke of some sort. They smiled and looked at each other and me as they passed. I couldn't figure out what they had said so I just smiled back. About 20 meters further, I was able to interpret in my head that the lady had said "Is one of those for us?!" It was so frustrating to have missed that opportunity to share that moment with them. Even worse, had I been able to figure it out quickly enough, I don't think I would've been able to come up with a funny response to play along either! Sigh.

What's preventing me from progressing more/quicker? Before we came to Lucca, we purchased Rosetta Stone, which, in case you don't recognize the name from radio and/or internet advertisements, is a language learning program (this was pre-DuoLingo by the way which is a free language learning app I recommend you check out). We started to do some of the lessons while still in California, but learned only super basic words. The plan was that once we got here, we'd be surrounded by Italians using the Italian language all the time so by process of immersion we'd just know it. Right? The problem we've run into is that we're not really immersed as much as we thought we'd be. Because we chose to homeschool the kids, we aren't surrounded by their classmates and their parents. We spend most of our time together, which was another plan for the year. The only drawback to that is that we all speak English! We do get out to shops and restaurants and those pieces of the language are the ones I've picked up the best. We don't have built-in opportunities where we're forced to learn the language, so when we have opportunity to try, we don't have enough experience to be successful. We need to know a bit more before we feel brave enough to try, but to get better, we need some more experience. It's a Catch 22.

Now a quick sidebar for my teacher friends who are reading this. Remember all the second language learning professional developments we've gone to? Remember how it's all great information but seems a bit hard to really relate to? I relate now. Completely. I've gone through a long period of Pre-Production and have recently hit Speech Emergence. I have two college degrees and 5 year-old children come up to me and say things to me and don't know what to say. Adults look at me like I'm a fool because I can't speak and half the time can't understand them. It's one of the most humbling experiences I've gone through.  I will have a completely new and different appreciation for future students who are new to English.

For now, I'm plugging away on Rosetta Stone which is actually a great program. It's slow and repetitive, but in a good way. Every time I do more I find myself using my phrases the next day. Today we went to buy some sports equipment and I was able to request things we needed, tell the lady our story, thank her for specific things she helped us with, tell the cashiers that we were on our bikes so if they could bag our things extra well we'd appreciate it, and understand a woman outside the store who asked if she could have our hangers since Ashley was about to throw them away to save space on our bikes...ok maybe I'm not doing that poorly. Perhaps I just need some more wine.