In any case, I still get nervous when speaking to French people and my perfect grammar and mastery of the subjunctive, preterite, conditional and the pronouns y and en go out the window, and so today in Cannes, I kept quiet until lunchtime when we went to a little restaurant called Da Laura, which is run by a friendly Italian family (Laura and her family, funnily enough). Although it was a bit confusing switching between French and Italian, it was so much more relaxing to be able to speak in Italian; my Italian vocabulary might be much smaller but my fluency is greater.
I think the native speaker teacher point is the key one here. I did, of course, have a French assistante for 40 minutes a week for the last three years at school (shared with seven to nine other pupils) and at Cambridge, I had a weekly supervision with an assistante shared with one other person, but it was already too late. I started Italian at the age of 16 and got my A at A-level after two years and it really helped that the classes were conducted entirely in Italian from the start and that we had an Italian teacher (even if I now have a Sardinian accent and swear like a Sardinian/Sicilian).
No comments:
Post a Comment