Introduction

Foreign languages are not my thing, and fulfilling the foreign language requirement has been among the toughest tasks that I’ve had to complete at Duke. I have taken six semesters of foreign language classes at Duke. In freshman year I took ancient Greek, but abandoned it because I feared that I was falling behind. I abandoned French halfway through the first semester, and I even dropped out of Italian 203 early last semester. For whatever reason, there is a block in my mind that keeps me from being successful at learning a new language. Italian 101 and 102 felt mostly the same. I felt like I knew a lot of vocabulary and grammar individually, but came to a block when I tried to put them together. Although I knew the rules theoretically, I wouldn’t say that I “knew” Italian. It was just a class I was taking, not a language I was learning.

Italian 203, however, has been a completely different experience. We haven’t done much of learning new grammar or vocabulary, but have mostly been solidifying old rules, practicing them, and applying them to various cultural projects. Working on these projects, I slowly began to feel more and more like I understood Italian. Standing up for the slow food presentation, I knew everything that I was saying. I had put work into the project, and I had a deep understanding of it in Italian.

A good deal of my learning has been thanks to collaboration. Being with classmates who are also just figuring out the language with me is very helpful. We all make our guesses as to what things mean, or how to say them. Each of us has our own facts about Italian that we remember from classes, and when we put them together we get a more complete picture of the language while taking away more knowledge than we each individually had. In-class group work was the most valuable work for me, followed by the scritturas.

Speaking Italian is easier than it has ever been before. I have been able to speak Italian in several contexts outside of the classroom. For instance, back in March I was involved in a murder mystery party, which is a party where one of the guests has been “murdered” and it’s the job of the partygoers to interview “suspects” to guess who the murderer is. I played Vinnie Frappuccino, an Italian-American and owner of the speakeasy where the murder took place. For much of the party I slipped Italian into my dialogue (and then for months afterwards couldn’t help but say “ciao, come stai,” to friends by way of greeting.

It has been a gratifying semester, and I’m happy to have taken this course. I feel more confident, not only about Italian, but also about learning other languages in the future. If I had more time at Duke, I might have taken more Italian, but, alas, the long journey has come to an end.

Ciao.