Submitted by Kaitlyn McConeghy on the 2018 spring semester program in Rome, Italy…
I was lucky enough to have taken Italian courses before I came to Rome and, when I first got here, I was really excited to test out my language skills and see if I could hang. The first thing I noticed, however, was that, after five years of studying Italian, I really was not as well prepared as I had hoped. My years of Italian taught me to conjugate verbs like “volere” (“to want”) in 6 or 7 different, and really situationally specific, tenses, but never things like what is the politest way to ask for something (through trial and error we’ve found that “posso avere ____?” usually works). For example, when you want to get off of the tram, the best way to ask someone to move is “permesso”: we tried “scusa” at the beginning of the trip and got quite a few looks. These kinds of nuances we’ve had to pick up on the fly, but they’re pretty important survival skills here.
While it’s true that many Italians also speak English, being able to speak in Italian seriously affects the way that people perceive you. Almost, if not all, of the meaningful connections that we’ve made here with locals have been made in the Italian language, and I think that’s something that you miss out on if you can’t converse well in Italian, or, worse, if the way that you speak Italian is perceived to be rude. The best advice that I could give to someone studying Italian in the hopes of traveling here someday is to try to learn how the Italians speak Italian, not just how the textbooks that most courses focus on teaching it. Italian isn’t the easiest language to pick up on, but I think you really get a different experience here if you’re able to speak the language.