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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is …
LEARNING BY DOING
Or
THINGS I’M LEARNING BY WRITING
It’s a few weeks now since I spoke about writing in Italian. Today, I wanted to do an update on what I’m learning by doing this.
First up, the subjunctive, or congiuntivo. I remember when I started learning Italian seeing it said, I don’t remember where, but more than once, that many Italians don’t even know when to use the subjunctive and don’t, which kind of rang true with me, because I know many people don’t use the limited subjunctive we have in English. But then, I also saw it said that Italians would be impressed by a foreigner using the subjunctive. Hang on a minute. If many Italians don’t know how to, or don’t use the subjunctive, how would they know you were doing it correctly in order to be impressed? Those two things don’t seem to go together. Which is correct? Or is there a little bit of truth in both statements? The thing is, the subjunctive is used all the time in Italian and I’ve seen and heard it used a lot. Okay, so books will generally be correct usage, but songs? I see a lot of subjunctive usage there, and if there was one place you might skip it, I’d think this would be it, where everything is generally truncated. And I hear it on the radio, not just from presenters, but guests and callers.
Okay, that was a long sidebar, but suffice it to say, one of the benefits of writing in Italian is helping to get my head around using the subjunctive, because it’s difficult. I think I’m starting to get better at recognising when I need it, which is no easy feat, but I don’t always get the subjunctive tense right when writing and sometimes I put it in when I could just use a conditional. So, this whole process is helping me to try to fix this in my brain, because having to correct myself when I check my writing is forcing me to try to understand where I’m going wrong, whilst doing something I enjoy. Yes, lots of Internet rabbit holes, because no one place answers it all and my grammar book isn’t specific enough on a particular sentence.
As I’ve hinted already, just getting tenses right in general is another thing I’m being forced to confront. I still make mistakes between passato prossimo and imperfetto, even though I think I have the reasoning between using them quite well fixed, it still trips me up. No, I don’t use Passato Remoto in my writing, because I need this to be relevant to speaking the language. Using Passato Remoto is not going to do that for me. I think I can recognise Traspassato prossimo now, although I don’t always recognise it in the first pass of something, but when reading through afterwards. And most of the time, future and conditional are okay.
I’m also getting used to using the present tense more, which is something you use in speech the whole time, but when learning a language I think it gets a little buried behind all the more difficult stuff and not practised as much.
This is, of course, a very simplified tenses run-down. There are 21 tenses in Italian, although some would call the subjunctive a mood and various others I don’t really see as tenses, such as using infinitives and past participles.
What I love more than anything, though, else is finding phrases and just general vocabulary, when I read or watch videos, that I can use within stories or poems, things that native speakers would say that I’ve either never heard before, or aren’t in my active vocabulary. I know that using these things will be unlikely to end up with me knowing them well enough to use in speech, but just being able to recognise them passively when reading, the feeling you get when recognising something you’ve used in this way when it comes up again, for me, is a joy.
I’m sure I’ll do more updates on this, but …
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.