It’s enough to tie one’s native tongue

IT was about the time my Italian teacher was explaining exceptions to the exceptions to the rule on article and adjective modifiers for possessive nouns that I uttered the only Italian phrase that came easily after studying the language for a week.

“Come mai?”

Roughly translated, that means, “But why?” I said it with a long, despairing, quasi-operatic moan that made my teacher stop, surprised.

“Susana, that would have been perfect if you’d done this at the same time,” she said, cupping her hands, putting them together back to back, and then bouncing them up and down. I’d seen that all-purpose Italian gesture of emphasis in all three parts of “The Godfather.”

I tried it with come mai and felt so pleased with the result that I decided I stood at least a remote chance of someday being able to speak Italian.

Learning a foreign language is never easy, of course. It takes a significant time commitment, and it taxes the gray matter. But there is no better tool for travelers. Knowing how to speak a foreign language is a magic key to foreign cultures, a piece of travel gear far more useful than a backpack or guidebook.

I studied French in high school and college. For a long time, that was all I needed to blunder around France, though French people clearly became enervated whenever I opened my mouth. Oddly, it seemed, I spoke French with more fluency and fewer inhibitions in Francophone places apart from the mother country, such as Morocco and Quebec. On a few delightful occasions, I found I could use French as a lingua franca, as when I met an Italian couple in the Indian Ocean islands of Seychelles. They didn’t speak English, and I didn’t know Italian, so we communicated gleefully in a halting, ungrammatical pidgin French that would have appalled a native speaker.

When I moved to Paris almost two years ago, I spent a month studying French intensively, which has enhanced my experience abroad. Now I understand about half of what I hear, I read French newspapers and I can usually figure out how to say what I want, though I won’t soon be asked to join the Academie Francaise, that great bastion of the French language.

Never mind. Learning just a few words in a foreign language before taking a trip opens doors for a traveler. So before a recent visit to Montenegro, I taught myself to say “hello,” “goodbye,” “please” and “thank you” in that country’s seemingly impenetrable mother tongue, linguistically akin to Serbo-Croatian.

I increasingly resemble a character in “Queens’ Play,” a novel by Dorothy Dunnett, who “spoke many languages and left them broken-hinged and crumbled like clams, solely attacked for the meat.”

It’s hard to explain why I recently started studying Italian before perfecting my French. It could be because I’m part Italian and love the country of Fra Filippo Lippi, Giuseppe Garibaldi and linguine alle vongole.

It’s thought to be more difficult for a native English speaker to learn Italian than Spanish, although it’s easier than German. Italian is full of mysterious consonant combinations (ghi, gli, gna), big mouthfuls of words with impossible-to-predict stressed syllables, complex grammatical rules, exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. It’s “una lingua perfida” (a perfidious language), my teacher said at the first class.

To complicate matters, I took a two-week, intensive beginning Italian course at the Centro di Lingua e Cultura Italiana in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The course was taught mostly in Italian, except when explanations were necessary, and then they were given in French. There was one other American in my class; everyone else was a native Francophone. In any language, it was a hard two weeks of concentrated learning, testing my proficiency in French and my propensity to learn Italian. I often left class with a headache.

Fortunately, the Italian Language and Culture Center in Paris, in a little storefront building across an alleyway from medieval St. Severin church, is a good place to begin studying Italian. It offers a variety of courses at beginner, elementary, middle, advanced and superior levels, and its two-week intensive language study series are given several times throughout the year. Once you become a member of the center (for about $50), you can attend cultural events -- plays, concerts, films and museum tours -- in Italian.

I took the class with a French friend. We met every morning at a bus stop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, got off near the Cluny Museum, had coffee and reviewed our homework, then went to class. Question-and-answer exercises helped us get acquainted with our fellow students, as when we were asked, “Che lavoro fai?” (What do you do?) One was a head chef (capa cuoco), another an architect (architetto).

In class, we learned how to handle basic social interactions in Italian and some grammar. I can now introduce myself in that language, tell time, count and shop for clothes and groceries. I can conjugate such difficult irregular Italian verbs as avere (to have), fare (to do) and essere (to be) -- but only in the present tense. The past tense is studied in the next series of classes.

The combo method

VARIOUS methods for teaching foreign language have been used in schools, including the once-popular “communicative” approach, which emphasized constant talking over grammar. Now, the highly regarded Graduate School of Language and Educational Linguistics at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., favors a combined approach, like the one used in my Italian course. It includes conversational interludes and traditional grammar study, said associate professor Renee Jourdenais.

Most of what is known about language acquisition has resulted from the study of braininjury victims.

“We know there is no one place in the brain where language is stored,” Jourdenais said. “It’s scattered around, mostly in the left hemisphere.”

In the 1950s and ‘60s, aptitude tests were devised to gauge an individual’s propensity for learning a foreign language. But these are rarely used now, except by the military. Prior knowledge -- in my case, having studied French in school -- does seem to facilitate foreign-language acquisition, but few factors beyond that have been identified to predict a student’s learning potential, Jourdenais said.

There are, however, reasons native French speakers may find it easier than native Anglophones to learn Italian. French and Italian are Latin-based Romance languages; they have similar grammatical structures and sounds. But English is largely a Germanic language. “It is likely,” Jourdenais said, “that in Italian classes you were drawing more on your French than on English. Possibly, you even improved your French.”

Jourdenais reminded me that being taught a new language in a language that is not your native tongue, as I did when I took Italian classes in French, is a common experience for students of English as a second language in the U.S. “In ESL classes, people usually come from a wide range of language backgrounds,” she said. “The assumption is that the teaching will be in English.”

These days, I’m thinking in three languages -- English, French and Italian -- and never know which one will pop out when I open my mouth. In a Morocco restaurant recently, I met an Italian couple with whom I communicated in a messy hodgepodge of all three.

“We used to think of foreign language as something you had to learn completely and be good at,” Jourdenais said.

“You had to know the past conditional tense. But more and more, we are realizing what language is actually for: talking to people.”

D’accord, as they say in French, or d’accordo in Italian. Or, as we say in English: Right.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.