Phase 1 Complete!

Having just returned from a two-week trip to Rome, my experience with speaking a new language reached a new level. This new level has prompted me to begin this blog about learning a new language – in my case Italian.

My saga to learn Italian began 18 months ago when I visited Italy for 19 days. I fell in love with the country, the people, the wine, the food and the life. After coming home, I found myself constantly thinking about Italy and was quite surprised to discover how strongly I wanted to return to the place. I made myself a promise that I would get back there soon – and this time, speak a little of the language to enhance the experience.

Around Christmas of 2006, I started investigating the best method to learn to speak Italian. This is my first time learning a new language – besides the required 2 years of Spanish in high school – and I had no idea where to start. The only name I knew was Pimsleur, and that name only because my wife had once purchased the beginning lessons of Pimsleur French.

My goal was to conquer the 90 half hour lessons of Pimsleur Italian before I returned to Italy. Not only did I achieve that goal, but I also finished two other courses, Michel Thomas and Living Language. I will write complete blogs about all three learning systems in subsequent entries. I went so far as to order RAI Italian television on my Dish satellite, listen to Italian radio over the internet and find the very rare acquaintance who spoke a little Italian.

14 months of hard work. 14 months of ups and downs, trials and tribulations, successes and failures, mood swings, alcoholic indulgences and learning. But I made it through. I survived. I taught myself a crap load of Italian.

And then I returned to Italy.

I was nervous, I was scared that all of that hard work would go to waste. I was afraid that it wouldn’t matter once I got to Italy. I was wrong. I was thankfully very, very wrong.

This recent trip to Rome became a big moment in my life. A turning point in realizing what can be accomplished. With a payoff that is so often hard to come by in life.

I spoke Italian with Italians.

And when you speak Italian with Italians, it takes your trip to a whole new level. A deeper, more interesting level. It creates a slightly closer bond with people. Hell, I think I even liked the wine a little more because I could actually order it in Italian.

And I got compliments. On my accent! I was asked if my parents were Italian. And when I told them I had learned by myself with audio CDs – they were flabbergasted. And I was overwhelmed. 14 months ago I had set a goal of having a conversation with someone in Italian – in Italy – and I had not only succeeded, I had been complimented.

This experience was so astounding, so completely fulfilling, that it has forced me, seriously, to write about it. I’m writing about it so that maybe someone else can benefit a little in their quest to learn, that someone finds a tip in here that gets them over the hump, or that someone gives me some helpful advice that gets me further into the full immersion of learning a language.

I’ve titled this blog entry Phase 1 Complete! because I feel after my trip that I conquered basic understanding and simple conversation. Of course I couldn’t understand everything that was said to me in Italy, the speed at which people talk and their various accents made even simple sentences sometimes hard to understand. My guess is that I know about 1,000 words - my goal now is 3,000. And to be fully fluent. A year from now. April 2009. Fluent in a language in two years.

Easy? Hell no. Impossible? Not at all. Rewarding? More than I could have ever imagined.

730 days. 2 years. The longer you wait to start, the further away your goal will be. What else are you going to do over the next 2 years? Watch more TV?

Imagine, fluent in Italian in April 2010. It has a nice sound to it.