Learning Italian

Vegas or Italy... honestly don't know which one yet, but I'm preparing for both. The above photo is also both at once!

Cleaned up the old resume and am now looking (and applying for) freelance jobs in the Vegas area. Also reading a book on learning Italian. Italian for Dummies, whatev! This book is like two years of French class wrapped up in two chapters! Oh, wait a minute... ;)

My goal is to get the basic vocab and grammar down (it's a mix of Engish, French, and Latin rules!) so that once there, I can focus on learning new words via immersion. Might also do Rosetta Stone stuff after I get the grammar down. You know, immersion before the immersion?

Italian is a beautiful language in its simplicity. For example, you can omit most subject pronouns with verbs as the conjugation of the verb tells you which pronoun would proceed it! In other words, I could just say, "want chocolate" and how I conjugate 'want' implies 'I' want, or 'you' want, or 'she' wants, or 'they' want ... Fascinating!

Also, the nouns, pronouns and adjectives are masculine and feminine but they all must agree and they all will have different endings based on the object you're talking about. For example:

• il ragazzo italiano - the Italian boy
• i ragazzi italiani - the Italian boys
• la ragazza italiana - the Italian girl
• le ragazze italiane - the Italian girls

You can see now why I'm trying to get all this straight before I go there! :)

And I'm loving the use of accents. I wish English used them more. For example, in Chinese how you say the word "ma" changes what it means! If you say it in an even tone (like a typical American male says everything) it would be MĀ. If you said it like a question, it would be written MÁ. If you said it in a falling tone, MÀ, and if you said it with a rise and fall, MÂ. They all mean different things! (“mama”, “hemp”, ”horse”, and “to scold” - a naughty word, I was told!)

Italian isn't that extreme with the use of accents, but it still uses them. My name has one... the altered pronunciation from it is probably too subtle for most Americans, but that's okay. I'll hear it when someone says it!

Another neat thing about Italian, the penultimate (second to last) syllable in each word is usually the stressed syllable. That's why an Italian accent sounds the way it does! Neat! Well, that, and the way they pronounce the vowels, A (ah), E (ay), I (ee), O(oh), and U (oo). But the stress is what really makes the language sing: ee-ta-lee-AN-oh (Italiano). I don't have synethesia, but I hear the notes (g, f#, g, E, c) when I hear that word! Cursing in French may be like 'wiping your ahss with silk' but speaking everyday words in Italian is like singing a song!

Of course Vegas still lures me. It's the one city I considered living before I initially left America and it's now the last American city I'll consider living in. I guess it's fitting in some ironic cosmic sense that I could feel so at home in a city so fake. I don't know... something about the fakeness is comforting... as if the whole town knows enough not to take itself too seriously.

Perhaps I'm just drawn to the opulence of it all. I mean, if America is all about living in excess, then Vegas is that done right!