Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
er; herbrother-in-law,EdTumin hadintroduced ustoT.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens andmuch
more the year before.
In those days Weequahic had a language department better than those at many universities.
My Russian teacher, Simon Chasen, was the greatest linguist I ever had the privilege to
encounter. He was fluent in more than twenty languages and would teach us words by tra-
cing their etymologies and showing us their migrations through the various European lan-
guages. At Weequahic he taught Russian and Hebrew during the school day. After school,
as part of the extracurricular program, he offered weekly classes in Swahili, classical Greek
and Indonesian. I attended the Greek and Indonesian classes with him, but I wasn't able to
take Swahili because it met on the same afternoon as my Mandarin Chinese class (which
was taught by a professor from nearby Seton Hall University). On those days when there
weren't any language clubs, I played touch football or half-court basketball like a normal
kid. The rest of time I gobbled up languages like a hungry chicken. By the time I arrived at
college, I was granted third-year advanced placement in French, Hebrew and Russian.
Although I was already in my early forties when Pam and I made our first trip to Tuscany,
and I hadn't done any language study in almost twenty years, I felt confident that I would
be able to rise to the occasion. After starting out with Hebrew, where you write backwards
in another alphabet, and Russian, where nouns have six different case endings in three dif-
ferent genders, also in another alphabet, I was not easily intimated.
We took an introductory conversation course at the Santa Rosa Junior College before our
first trip to Italy. And we continued to take additional conversation classes over the next
couple years with the wonderful, dedicated SRJC faculty. I also read Italian comic books
religiously. The combination of words and pictures helped with retention and saved many
trips to the dictionary. It was also a great way to learn colloquial and slang expressions—at
least the kind that Mickey, Minnie and Donald use in front of children.
I bought language tapes to play while driving or traveling or working out at the gym. My
favorite was a set of tapes from Transparent Language that I must have listened to a hun-
dred times. The series told the story of the Italian transportation engineer, Giorgio Ferrante,
who is transferred to the company's main offices in Switzerland, where he has to learn to
get along with his new boss, Sandra di Michele. The topic sounds about as exciting as wet
laundry, but the scripting and the acting were impeccable, like radio drama at its finest.
The series was rich with the subtle variations in regional accents and with the different
styles of conversation that one might hear among friends, among professional colleagues,
among casual acquaintances, among amorous couples. There were sidebars that explored
the quirks and intricacies of Italian life, like the Byzantine process of awarding public con-
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