radio italy

My Italian is coming along quite quickly. Half of it is cuss words, but even so. I am not making as much conscious effort as I did with French, but my unconscious mind seems to be running its own program. This week it is doing the passato prossimo tense. Whatever I’m doing, whatever the time of day, my brain keeps creating nonsense sentences in this tense. ‘You have looked at a head’ or ‘I have forgotten the boots’ or ‘That baby has eaten the computer.’ It’s odd but it doesn’t really bother me, and I am certainly producing the passato prossimo more smoothly than I did a week ago.

My listening comprehension is slowly improving too. I hadn’t really noticed it until a couple of days ago, when I realised that I was understanding snatches of conversation as I rode through town. Eaves-dropping is something you take for granted in your native language—you pick up five-second fragments of other people’s lives everywhere you go, like it or not. Take yourself out of your native language and suddenly other people’s conversations fade out like white noise. Lately, it is like the radio is tuning back in. My comprehension is still on a delay, so in my head it sounds a lot like this: blah blah incomprehensible blah blah but my wife can’t cook for shit. It’s actually a bit spooky.