I decree a stalemate

I define my deeper motives

I recognize the weapons

I’ve practiced them well, I fitted them myself

REM

I remember when I landed in Rome almost two years ago.  Unlike with previous visits where I was showing up as only a blink of a tourist, I now arrived with a visa in my passport and the knowledge that this would be home for a couple of years.  The downside was that I arrived with no training in Italian. Indeed I enjoyed a very steady foundation in French, but I also appreciated that this would not serve as a reliable bridge to everyday communication and function. The two languages are of course based in Latin, and as such there are many similarities—but that doesn’t mean that one person can talk to the other in their mother tongues and find comprehension (such as we see in Scandinavia). 

It is both good and bad to show up in a new country where you speak two other languages. On the one hand, you’re more than willing to fling yourself into the trade winds of interaction, trying out new words that are unknown in both pronunciation and meaning.  You are automatically less self-conscious about doing this because you’ve already been down this road before, and you’ve seen the fruits of many hours of self-deprecating and often embarrassing labor. This is how I felt when I first moved to Italy. I was ready to learn Italian because I’d weathered learning French.

On the other hand, coming to a new country with another language in your catalog sets you up for a certain degree of frustration. Frustration at not comprehending everything in short order. Frustration from opening your mouth to say something and not being able to construct a single phrase in this completely new language.  Frustration when you start Italian lessons because your Italian teacher keeps stopping you to say, “No that is French”. This is how I felt when I first got to Italy.  I wanted to be immediately fluent. Har har har.

I feel a bit self-conscious in writing about this a tall, because I don’t want to sound ungrateful or out of touch when I express my exasperation with learning a third language. On the one hand, there are millions of schoolchildren who grow up with this as their living reality (unlike in the U.S. young kids are on their third languages in short order). As for those who only exist with one language to navigate, it can seem like a real gift to be granted a window into a new culture. The opportunity to learn a new language. This holds true no matter what your age happens to be.

Last week I went north to take a standardized test that would measure my listening and reading comprehension in Italian. I opted to take the exam after almost two years of driving my head into Italian walls, trying to immerse myself in as much television, radio, movies and literature as possible. As for speaking, I try to do it as well, but this skill is more of a psychological slog. While the actual test left my brain more or less spent after a few hours, I was handed a sheet of results that proclaimed surprisingly good results. I left the test grounds feeling proud of myself for pushing this fortysomething mind into a new way of communicating

But in learning Italian, I have found that another hard-fought skill has atrophied. I’m talking about my ease in speaking the French language.

I remember shortly after the pandemic began, some friends from France FaceTimed me early one morning while we were all stuck at home. This was the first conversation where I heard myself speaking, and to my mortification I started interspersing Italian words into my French.  I kept using “ma” instead of “mais”.  Simple things.  My friend, however, has a very kind and forgiving demeanor, and he never let on that my language skills were going south. 

Fast-forward a few months later to another FaceTime call when he called me back with his husband in the room.  Someone who I have known since I was 16. When I spoke, I could now see his husband’s face screwing with concentration at my words. I felt self-conscious. Like this was a failing conversation. After we hung up, I remembered that language skills are like muscles: they must be exercised if they are to remain in fighting form. Intellectually I understood this but I felt frustrated that it was happening to me.

Last week after taking the Italian test, I was informed that my French aptitude test results had ust expired and I would need to retake it if I wanted to maintain my currency. Fine. Now I will be honest (or perhaps arrogant) in saying that my comprehension and reading skills in French have not suffered. Indeed, I’ve read a few books in French over the past couple of years and consider the activity a “break” from reading in Italian.  I do not feel too distressed about retaking the French exam. But regardless of whatever the standardized test tells me, I still feel great frustration and almost distress over the fact that my speaking has taken such a nosedive since arriving in Italy.

When I went to take the Italian test, I stayed at the house of my language teacher. One evening, we went out shopping for some well-deserved downtime following my big testing day. She needed to pop into a record store in order to buy concert tickets, and of course I followed her inside. As she worked with the clerk to order the tickets, I wandered around the shop as if it were Aladdin’s Cave. Collections of vinyl and CD compilations were there for the browsing, just like they were when I was a kid. I’m a sucker for these types of shops, and so naturally I left with an old timey CD in hand. Spotify and my phone’s digital music collection be damned.

I bought a double CD of REM Unplugged from both 1991 and 2001. Almost thirty years ago, I had a bootleg tape of the REM Unplugged show from 1991, and so I was thrilled to get my veiny hands on a new copy.  

At the start of the six-hour drive back to Rome, I popped the CD into my car’s player. It was a pleasant autumn day with plenty of leaf-changing color on the rolling fields and in the trees.  As the Unplugged session from 1991 started, I found myself singing aloud to every song. I remembered the particularities from this live album, even though it had been decades since I’d listened to it.  Sure a few decades ago I had also owned the Document, Green and Out of Time albums and as such was well acquainted with the lyrics—but I still had lodged back in my brain the oddities of this particular performance.

It seemed like a short drive back with my voice tired from off-key singing of rediscovery of these familiar songs. But in marveling at my brain’s musical recall, I also wondered why my French skills weren’t having the same kind of bounce back. It had taken me a few moments to remember easy phrases like “I fell asleep”—something which I immediately I knew in Italian (mi sono addormentata) but now took a bit of cranial mining before remembering, “Of course, it’s je me suis endormie”. 

Che palle.

My dad would often say that gaining knowledge was like collecting frogs. Every time you learn something new, it’s like walking around and picking up another frog. Sooner or later, your hands are going to get full of these leggy beasts, and at some point you’ll lean down to grab a new one, and one of the resident guys will wriggle out and hop away. It’s as if you can only hold on to so many with an appreciable degree of integrity.

I have worked incredibly hard to collect all of my frogs—whether they have to do with languages or not.  And while of course I don’t want to see any of these life skills hopping away from me, I really don’t want to lose my French…even while I am gaining proficiency in Italian. I worked incredibly hard to gain my French fluency after putting in a marginal effort as a teenager in Grenoble. And after so many years of effort, I hate to admit that I now open my mouth and only a bizarre pastiche of Italian-laced French comes out.

Much to my chagrin, I need to accept that for me, the French language for me cannot be equated to the 80s and 90s music that I lived and breathed as a teenager.

And so next week I will once again take a short hop outside of Rome and undergo a reading and listening test in another language. And while I do feel confident that I’ll perform with this French iteration, part of my dreads even the possibility that I might receive marks that are inferior to my encouraging Italian score. And if this does happen, what then? Most immediately, it’s a blow to my fragile ego. But more than anything, it will undoubtedly make me wonder if I’ve got the brain smarts (or frog-holding capacity) for more than one language.  I guess that only time will tell. But not with this one test—but mostly likely it will come with  my level of commitment to continue using both with regularity.