Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Learning the Language: Concentric Circles
W
hen we moved in Tuscany in the summer of 2004, Pam and I already spoke more than
enough Italian to manage our daily affairs. We had been pecking away at it through the
course of ten summer vacations. Every summer as we'd get a bit more fluent, we would also
see our limitations all too clearly. “This time”, we'd tell ourselves as we'd be flying back to
the States, “this time we'll really buckle down and get serious about learning Italian.”
But,assoonaswegotbackintotheswirlingworldoftrainingproposals,phoneconferences,
travel bookings, software updates and all the rest, our best intentions always fell by the way-
side. Nevertheless, over the winters we did manage to listen to language tapes as we drove
around, and we'd rent Italian movies with subtitles to give ourselves an occasional workout.
And we would remember to speak Italian at dinner, every once in a while, so that our kids
wouldn't lose everything they had learned over the summer.
Our feeble efforts notwithstanding, the kids would forget almost everything they knew of
Italian every year. Then, when we would return to Tuscany, they would relearn it almost
from scratch. By the time we moved to Tuscany, Siena, our seven-year-old, had been there
eight times and Emma, our four-year-year old, had been there five times—not counting the
trips they made in utero. So, we had ample opportunity to observe the language acquisition
and loss process. The children's relearning time grew shorter every year, and they would get
much further along each time.
Toward the end of the summer when our younger daughter, Emma, was three-and-a-half
years old, I surreptitiously recorded her on video sitting under the kitchen table chatting in
Italian with her Barbies. The following spring, back in California, I played that segment of
the tape for her. She asked me who that little girl was and what she was saying.
We worried a bit about how our children would manage in school in a foreign language, but
the teachers we spoke with told us not to be concerned. They said that children under the age
of eight generally picked up Italian in about three months. They assured us that kids from
Kosovo, Somalia, and Romania all spoke like natives after a few months, and ours would
also. They were right. Our kids soon began playing with each other and their friends in Itali-
an, chattering at lightning speed while running around the town. A few months later they
began correcting their parents' pronunciation and grammar, and they've never stopped. It's
so unfair.
Well-intentioned as efforts at bilingual education in the States may be, it was sobering to see
how quickly and how perfectly young children learn a foreign language when they are just
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