Lottie Lomme
This is the first part of a 10-part series about how it took me 20 years to become a certified Italian teacher. Level A0, which this first part is about, is about prior knowledge. What tools did I have to learn a language? Which languages did I already speak? How did I acquire my language skills? What is my educational background and my experience with other languages?
English
I started with English in primary school. Although I eventually reached a C1 level in high school, English mainly helped me with Italian because my vocabulary was the largest of the foreign languages and because quite a lot of Italians also speak it. You can always ask: Come si dice [English word] In italiano?
French
I took French as an elective in high school. I certainly benefited from French in high school, especially because I learned how a language works grammatically. The rows of the future, conditional, imperfect and the perfect tense, which works exactly the same in Italian at level A1 and A2. I did my French final exam at an A2/B1 level.
I found the French lessons at secondary school quite boring, but there was an acceleration in the upper years because I only went on holiday to France. I was a troubled adolescent. Storm and urge. When I was fifteen I went to France alone for a week with Eurolines. Sleeping in a youth hostel in Lyon and I joined a religious walking tour from a monastery where my aunt had lived for a while. I wasn't very religious, but it offered me an opportunity to escape the small Brabant village where I grew up.
That solo trip taught me that you have to dive in at the deep end when it comes to language acquisition. And I turned out to like that very much. Muddling through with the language, being corrected and learning by doing.
Portuguese
When I was 18 I went to Brazil for six months. I ended up with a host family who didn't speak English and had to learn Portuguese to get by. After 6 months I was at an A2 level, without any of it grammar to study. That practice was a good learning experience. I learned by making a lot of mistakes and surrendering to the fact that it was inevitable. Portuguese is, of course, also a Romance language, just like Italian.
In Brazil I also visited unsafe places, but I was never really afraid. I think my brain hadn't yet developed properly to assess risk. In Italy I later suffered from the feeling of insecurity when I lived in a suburb of Rome. Then I was 24.
Study in Italy
In 2000 I went to study psychology in Amsterdam, but I couldn't find my footing socially, I didn't feel at home and I didn't feel like doing statistics at all. So I started taking courses on non-western history and one day in the Department of History I saw a brochure from the Nuffic: 4 years of study in a European country with financial aid from the European Union?
That appealed to me. I dropped out of psychology and decided that I would go to Italy. Portugal or France would of course have been more logical, because I already spoke a little Portuguese and French. But my parents' neighbor mentioned the oldest university in Europe in Bologna and I knew Italy as a holiday destination from my youth. So I decided to move to Italy and enroll as a first year student at the University of Bologna.
It was rash to want to get an Italian diploma with my preparation for an A1 course in the Netherlands. Now I can laugh at people I leave who talk to a contractor with a limited knowledge of Italian, but that's mainly because I recognize how NOT to do it.
But on the other hand: brutal people have half the world and if you don't dare, you don't win. How this story continues, you will read in the sequel.
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