Amo l'italiano

I’ve been studying Italian for around 5 full months now.  After an extremely steep learning curve in the first few weeks, during which time I seemed to grasp a lot of the grammar pretty quickly, I seemed to hit a plateau a couple of months in.  This was a little disheartening because I felt as if I’d stopped learning—as if I’d reached my peak and couldn’t go any further any time soon.  But fortunately that passed.  Perhaps my learning pace did level-off to some extent and the psychological impact was difficult to deal with.  Perhaps I’ll never learn as much so quickly again as what I learned in those first few precious weeks.  But I certainly feel like, for the most part, I’m learning new things every single day at the moment.

Yet there’s one extremely important aspect of the four language skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening) that continues to have a strong hold over me.  I can’t for the life of me listen to Italian being spoken and comprehend what I’m hearing.  In fact, I think I have the same problem with my first language, English.  When I’m listening to somebody speaking for several minutes at a time, I lose track of everything that’s being said very easily.  At least with English it’s easy to “tune back in” to the conversation and not finish up too confused, since I understand English perfectly (of course!).  But with Italian it often just sounds like a jumble of words—sometimes even worse—a jumble of noise.

I sit an evening class twice a week and in terms of reading and writing, and general knowledge of Italian grammar I’m very far ahead among the students in my group.  But when we sit down to do a listening exercise, I’m always the student who gets left behind while the other students seem to manage it fairly well.

I’ve decided that I’m not focusing enough on this aspect of my learning, probably because I find it difficult and therefore less enjoyable.  With reading and writing I know I’m getting better all the time, so it’s extremely rewarding.  But with listening (and in part, speaking), I’m really struggling.  The text book for the Intermediate Italian course I’m taking after-hours is called “Da Capo” and fortunately it’s provided with the CD we use in class for the listening portions of the lesson.  I’ve been going through all of these listening exercises and trying to figure out exactly “why” I find it so tricky.  And I think I have the answer to that—comprehension is not important.  Even in your own language you don’t really listen to every single word being spoken.  You just hear a stream of noise that is familiar to you and you process the “general meaning” on-the-fly.  So I should be doing the same in Italian.  Don’t listen to every single word, just listen to the conversation.

Great!  Except, well, no.  I’d love to be able to get over this problem and just get on with learning Italian, but I still face a problem even knowing what I should be doing.  When I’m listening, even when I’m just trying to “get the gist of it” I (inevitably) lose track of what’s being said, even if just for a second, because I didn’t hear or understand some really small part of the transcript.  From there-on I cannot for the life of me tune back into the conversation I’m supposed to be listening to.  My brain get’s hung-up on trying to figure out what it was that I heard and didn’t understand, and I get further and further behind, until eventually the audio sample comes to and end and I’m completely lost—I have no idea what I heard because I missed some tiny element early on.

Things that trip me up are:

• Names of places and/or people – I almost always don’t recognize that it was just a name and that it’s not important, which makes the following words appear not to make any sense.
• Multiple words that sound as if they were spoken as a single word (including the “d” + apostrophe construction).
• Badly enunciated words – Even in what is generally clear speech, people seem to “slur” certain words at random.

Don’t get me wrong, I try to immerse myself in Italian every day, including listening to the radio.  We have an Italian radio station here in Australia due to the high number of Italian migrants, so I have that on through most of the day while I’m working because I’ve been told that hearing Italian at every opportunity is important.  Unfortunately, even though it’s playing in my ears I can’t sit there and just focus on it that (I have to work!), so it tends to just be music and voices playing in the background while I work.

Conversation isn’t too much of a problem for me neither, since it’s two-way.  You make a comment, then the other person responds and you have some idea as to what the nature of their response will be.  In other words, you have some control over the dialogue.  Listening to somebody else’s dialogue (or worse, monologue) however isn’t like this.  It’s up to you—the listener—to following along.

I guess I really need to take some time out of my reading/writing schedule to give my rather lacking listening skills a boost!  Any tips or words of encouragement are most welcome.