This is a very specific experience, but I think that it is significant enough to share with you all. This week, my school offered an after-class wine tasting at a local restaurant. Because it was one of the few afternoon activities that I could attend (my Italian culture class tends to interfere with the offered activities), I decided to sign up. This wasn’t for the wine, but instead because a woman in my class was nervous to speak in Italian with other people from the school she didn’t know. So I agreed to go with her, and I was excited to experience such an important part of Italian culture while getting more practice with my conversational Italian.
As we walked from the school to the restaurant, I observed that I was the youngest one on this excursion by at least 25 years. That meant that I was going to be grasping at straws for conversation topics. So after a quiet walk over only conversing with the woman from my class, we took our seats and began the program.
The man teaching us about the wines we would be tasting was a Sienese native who knew exactly zero words in English. He also had an extremely strong Tuscan accent, which made some sentences completely impossible to understand. But I buckled down and concentrated so that I could follow as much as possible and actually learn something about the wines. And we also learned that it is a very bad idea to make a joke about the Palio with a member of the Contrada that came in second place, that is, Oca, the home of the wine expert. Luckily, it wasn’t me who made the comment, and it gave us an opportunity to learn about what makes a person in Siena tick.
But all of this revelation was in Italian! Obviously, I’m no wine expert (like the gentleman sitting next to me), but that meant that the vocabulary I learned from the restaurant man was imprinted into my brain in Italian. For example, I know to look at the lacrime that the wine leaves on the glass to assess how thick the red wine is. I also learned some quirks of the Tuscan dialect, such as that in Tuscany it is acceptable to call a puppy a canino instead of a cagnolino.
After three hours of tasting wine and speaking completely in Italian, I had to return home for dinner with my host family. I thought it was the wine, even though I only had a few sips from each different type, because my mind felt weird. My thoughts seemed to flow more than be clear individual ideas in my head. Then I realized–I was starting to think in Italian! This was the first time it had happened to me, and I didn’t want to waste it. I had about 10 minutes at home before family dinner, and I made sure to listen to instrumental music rather than speak with my roommate in our standard English.
That dinner was one of the best conversations we’ve had with our family, also. We were swapping stories about food, family, what we’ve done so far in Italy. The news was on as always, and I was following stories much better than usual and contributing to discussion of current events. Because I wasn’t wrestling with my thoughts as much, the language came much more naturally for me.
This experience has made me very hopeful for my chances of achieving fluency. With my departure just around the corner, I have to accept that this isn’t going to happen on this trip, but I’ve gotten a taste of the language in its natural habitat, and I am definitely farther along in my speaking skills than I ever imagined. While this way of thinking slowly changed back to what I now recognize as my English thought process, I know that my capabilities are there. It’s just up to me to unlock them.