Learning Italian!

I had my first Italian class last night, a one-month intro course sponsored by Morale, Welfare, and Recreation. The instructor is a feisty little Italian woman named Francesca with the standard blonde hair, high heels, and designer clothes. She wrote on a flipchart with a marker that was 90% dry and impossible to read. She also talked a mile a minute. About half the class of twenty is teachers, so it's a lot of fun. She went a mile a minute and it was impossible to take it all in . . . we covered two units in 3 hours . . . the alphabet, introducing ourselves and others, dialogue in a restaurant, and basic conjugation of "to be." Whew.

There's always someone who already knows it all, and this class had a pair of them, a married couple. We advised them to quit ruining the curve and find another class. They made us all look bad.

One woman in the class is from the South and her pronunciation of Italian is funny. Well, we ARE in southern Italy, after all.

I'm determined to learn Italian no matter HOW long it takes me! This is just a starting point.

Get this, in Italian, high school teachers are called professoressa. Cool, huh? Elementary teachers and middle school have a different title (which I can't remember, of course).

It will be a while before I'm writing this in Italian. Stay tuned.