Was It Something I Said?

For those who live in the Los Angeles area, UCLA Extension is offering a few Italian courses in the spring quarter. The “Weekend Immersion Workshop” is one I have taken. At $295 it’s not really worth the money, unless you don’t have access to anything else. In any case, it’s much too simple for anyone who’s had more than a semester or two of Italian.

The others are sections of “Elementary Italian”. At $415 for two months of twice a week classes, they are a better bargain than the weekend course, although still much more expensive than the community college I currently attend. I haven’t taken any of these (it’s farther from home than I want to go late at night) but the descriptions sound like 2 and 3 might be good reviews for for many of us. It is possible to take these courses for credit that is transferable to UCLA. (I don’t know if other schools accept them.) See http://www.uclaextension.edu

The more I learn Italian, the more it seems to me I will never really learn Italian. There is something about language, the way one’s native language interacts with the way one thinks, the ways in which the language and world view interact, that is deeply imbedded in the brain. It doesn’t take long to learn that it is impossible to translate anything literally. You can’t just substitute the words of language A for the words of language B and expect to get something that is right, maybe not even something that makes sense. It’s not just the word order, although that’s part of it. There are just so many details that seem perfectly normal, simple, even instinctive to the native speaker, that are confusing, strange, perhaps completely incomprehensible to the non-native. The sentences in our textbooks are simplified. Certainly, a real Italian might sometimes say things that way, and if we say things that way we will be just fine. But pick up a novel, a newspaper, a play. Suddenly, everything is completely different. Words don’t seem to mean quite what we were told. Some things seem to be missing. Some things seem to have been inserted randomly for no good reason. I can go through each sentence, slowly, word by word, and figure out what they are saying, but I have no idea what they are really saying.

Yesterday was the first day of the new semester, and a difficult day it was.

I called my doctor’s office for an appointment and was told he couldn’t see me until 5pm, Feb 13 (an impossible time for me, since I have class on Wednesday nights). I explained to the receptionist, twice, that I’m in pain and can’t use my arm normally. I told her that I would be willing to see one of the other doctors (there are several of them in the same practice). She said she’d check with them and call me back. She never called back.

Boomer the cat was sick and turned out to be in critical condition, experiencing hypothermia and with blood filling his lungs. The cause of the bleeding is still unknown. It was uncertain whether he’d live through the night. (He did, but at this point he is still in very serious condition.)

A water main on our street broke, sending water bubbling up through the pavement. Picturesque but dangerous. So there was no running water in the house. (It had been fixed by the time I got home after school.)

The pool man never showed up, probably because he saw the street was blocked and couldn’t figure out another route (there are actually two, but it helps to know the layout of the neighborhood).

Class itself was fine. We had a full house of about 20 people. All but three were people I know from previous classes. Once again, il professore has launched his strategy of assigning too much homework on Monday. Adults with day jobs find it very difficult to prepare presentations (especially if they have to get together with someone else) or do large quantities of paperwork with only one free evening (Tuesday) .