School days, school daze!

We’re back in school again, at Scuola Saena Iulia. It works this way:

Everyone starts on a Monday. Monday mornings at 9:00, all students, new and old, report to school for coffee and a meet and greet. The new students are interviewed by instructors to see how far along they are in Italian (we range from complete beginners to quite advanced speakers), and then, at 10:00, the new and returning students are shuffled into classes by Mauro, the head of the school. Students in each class have roughly the same level of Italian.

We were placed in a class with Sarah, a young German college student working on a double major in theoretical math and Latin. She had decided she would like to study something a little more practical!

Our first class began really well. Franco, our very talented instructor, asked each of us to tell a bit about ourselves, especially why we are in Italy. Since each first Monday class begins this way (this was the 7th Monday class for us after six weeks of study last year), and since we talk about this pretty much wherever we go in Italy, we did REALLY REALLY WELL!

Our euphoria was not to last. Franco announced we would begin by studying the dreaded pronouns!

Italian pronouns are tricky. For one thing, there are a lot of them. For another, they come in masculine and feminine varieties. For another, they come in direct and indirect flavors. As if that weren’t bad enough, sometimes two of them, when they are together, change (e.g., a “mi” followed by a “li” always goes rogue and insists that it wants to become a “me” followed by “li”). And, from time to time, two pronouns are combined, sometimes in a more or less logical fashion, as when “gli” followed by “li” becomes “glieli” and sometimes with no logic discernible to English speakers at all, as when “le” followed by “li” also becomes “glieli.” (Americans like us and other English speakers beginning to learn Italian are famous for constructing laborious sentences to avoid using any pronouns at all. Asked, “did Karl give you those earrings ” Leslie Ruth would respond, “yes, Karl gave me these earrings” when any Italian would respond, “yes, Karl me them gave.”

At the end of our class on Tuesday, Leslie Ruth and Karl were still struggling, but making progress. Sarah, being a bit of genius, had mastered pronouns and was ready for new challenges, so they bumped her up to a more advanced class, while we continued to study pronouns.

Wednesday, Leslie Ruth and Karl joined Sarah and her new class to watch a thoroughly depressing movie, The Consequences of Love, by a famous (and perhaps thoroughly depressed) Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino, with discussion led by Franco. The actors all seemed adept at using pronouns.

By the end of class on Thursday, we had a (pretty) firm grip on the rules of pronouns, and were able to use them in conversation. (Unlike beginners, students at our level are famous for constructing sentences whose only purpose is to force in a pronoun or two.) We were ready for a break!

No break was forthcoming. On Friday, Franco launched us into the study of the dreaded prepositions! We started by learning to chant, as all Italian elementary school students do, “di, a, da, in, con, su, per, tra, fra.” We now chant this as we walk around Siena, much to the amusement of the locals.

There are nine prepositions; we started with “di” and its seven (as Karl counted them – he may have missed one or two) uses. We mastered “a,” which only has four uses. We covered two uses of “da” by the end of the class, leaving us six more prepositions (and, no doubt, more uses for “da”) to cover when we begin class next week.

We’ve made a lot of progress, but our awareness of how much we have yet to learn grows!