Recommended Reads: An Italian Family, by Franca Magnani

Every now and again, a dip in the bookshop's bargain bin can be like hitting the jackpot. I'm always on the lookout for books that capture the multilingual experience from a human point of view, and Franca Magnani's memoir, An Italian Family, which expresses the amusing and confusing realities of a multilingual upbringing, hits all the registers.

Magnani's witty, intelligent and warm writing style takes the reader back to a very fraught time in European history when adapting swiftly to new situations and environments was absolutely key to survival.

What do you mean, you've never heard of Franca Magnani?! Umm... join the club. Neither had I before I rescued said book from the cruel fate of ending up in the maws of the recycling plant. Turns out, Franca Magnani was a journalist, foreign correspondent and author who spoke Italian, French, German and English to a superb degree.

Multilingualism was foisted upon her in 1928, at the tender age of three, when she left her grandfather's house in an Umbrian village to go and live in Marseille with three perfect strangers: her mother, her father and her older sister. Franca's parents, as politically active anti-fascists, had been forced to flee into exile a few years earlier. They left Italy separately and were unable to carry a baby across the mountains on foot while evading border patrols.

After spending just enough time in the French school system to sound like her French playmates, Franca and her family were uprooted again, this time being granted political asylum in Switzerland. They ended up in Zürich, presenting a triple linguistic challenge: getting to grips with Swiss German, the Zürich dialect and, later on, standard High German. The latter differs significantly from the dialect of German spoken in Zürich and more subtly from Swiss German.


Franca's father, Fernando Schiavetti, an Italian intellectual and committed anti-fascist, was also a linguistic purist determined that his daughters would not babble away in "migrantish." Not only was he hell-bent on his family conversing in "proper" Italian, but their command of the languages spoken in their host countries had to be just as impeccable.

The family's evening meal was subject to frequent interruptions when the daughters were ordered to prise either the Zingarelli, the Larousse, or the Langenscheidt off the shelf to make sure that words were being used correctly. The outbreak of WW2 put an end to these dictionary-accompanied family chats across the dinner table. Instead, they all listened to French, British, Italian, Swiss and German radio stations to see how the same events were covered from different points of view.

And although five different languages were spoken by the girls, mixing different languages in the same sentence was a capital offence in the Schiavetti household, punishable by a wallop on the back of the head (never a slap across the face, that was considered demeaning).

Hitting children on the head may have fallen out of fashion, and so has the view that code switching (mixing languages) demonstrates a lack of linguistic proficiency, but Daddy Schiavetti's dedication to the multilingual cause has to be applauded.


Here's another Recommended Read:
What Language Do I Dream In? by Elena Lappin


...and here's why excruciatingly bad books can still be great for language learning:
Why Terrible Books Can Be Terrible Useful 

When A Language Is Not A Love Match

French and I have fallen out again. I fear it may be terminal. This is somewhat embarrassing, since less than a month ago (on 8th October, to be exact), not only did I splash out a hundred and sixty bucks on a one-year-subscription to newsinslowfrench.com, but blogged excitedly about my fresh surge of enthusiasm for the language (see here). It didn't last. In fact, I've never been closer to ditching French altogether.

French, it seems, brings out the worst of my fickleness. The reason I started this tête-à-tête in the first place a year and a half ago was due to a sense of long-held, insidious embarrassment. Most people I know have at least a basic knowledge of French, because they were made to study it at school for a couple of years. Some took it further. Most didn't, but smattering of it stuck, and, in my observation, it serves them well.

Every time I delve into classic literature, I find it littered with French words and phrases. This makes sense from an historical perspective: In the 19th century, novels and other works were largely written by middle class authors for a middle class readership, and the middle (and upper) class(es) spoke French. Even today, these French fragments remain firmly on the pages of classic works, largely untranslated, and thereby inaccessible to me. (Or rather, inaccessible to the "Pre-May-2015-Me", which is when I started engaging with the French language for the first time in my life.) My primary motivation was to finally plug this gap in my education, and I assumed that love would slowly blossom, with a view towards making myself another linguistic home in the francophone sphere.

Unfortunately, it ain't happening. For all my willing it, I have not managed to turn, what was clearly a head decision, to resonate with me on an emotional level. The positive feedback loop I had been expecting to carry me forward through the sticky bits is gasping its last desperate puffs, like fish in a shallow pool of tepid water, ready to go belly up at any moment.

French and I just don't connect. It's a bit like growing weary of a house guest, who was exciting and fun at first, but who's now driving you round the bend with his idiosyncrasies and domestic ineptitudes. He ignores the dirty dishes in the sink, leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and never puts the toilet seat back down. AND he expects special treatment.

Endless lists of exceptions in grammar, vocab and pronunciation, which (on a good day) I find so endearing in Portuguese and which, to my mind, give a language its "character", irritate the hell out of me in French. There's a saying that goes something like this: "If you're fond of someone, you don't mind if they drop their dinner into your lap, but with someone you dislike, it bothers you how they hold their spoon". It feels like French is putting up barriers on purpose, just to annoy the learner. And me, in particular. It shouldn't be all that difficult - I'm already fluent in Spanish, my Portuguese is coming along just fine, and so a third Romance language ought to be a piece of cake on a silver platter! Yes, the whole thing is totally irrational, but whether someone takes to a language or not is rarely rooted in logic. Above all, you need chemistry, and that's what's missing between French and moi.

Despite this conclusion and all my whining, I don't consider my having invested effort into learning French a waste of time, not in the least. In fact, it has enriched my life, since I've pretty much reached my goal and can now immerse myself in the tomes of yesteryear without choking on turgid chunks of Français. I've even decided to spend a wee bit more time on it, at least until my command over this enfant terrible is on the same level as everyone else's "Bad French".

My long-term goal is to speak five languages "really well", and the only thing that has changed is that I now no longer think that French is going to be one of them.

Is Russian Worth Another Go?

I'm rekindling an old romance. I don't think it's serious... I'm just toying with him... but you never know. His name is Russian. We parted thirty years ago, after going steady for two whole years. I left him for English. Who was a lot less complicated.

Russian was so not my idea. We ended up together because of a school friend of mine. Actually, it was her mother's fault. She was a beautiful woman, my friends's mother, whose manfriends changed at regular intervals. My friend was forever competing for her attention, and the latest beau spoke Russian. So, as soon as she got wind that the neighbouring school was putting on extracurricular Russian classes and was looking for more students to make up numbers, my friend had to go for it. But not alone.

So, you want us to walk all the way across town to learn... Russian?! 

Yeah, it's gonna be such fun! 

On a Friday afternoon? You think I've nothing better to do?!?

And so, off to Russian we went. There were only seven of us. One of them was the teacher's long-suffering son, another one had long blue hair. As for the rest, I do not remember. We were taught by a flame-haired Hungarian woman who was all but four feet tall, but made up for it by sheer force of energy, killer heels and lashings of green eye shadow.

Every week, she made us take turns reading aloud from the textbook and I was terrified before each lesson because of that. I hate reading aloud. In any language. To this day. But I loved writing, and so I started writing my teenage diaries in Cyrillic script. I still have them, and I'm glad I do, because I can remind myself of how to write cursive Cyrillic. (Just in case it gets serious again.) It seems I was quite creative back then, using half a Cyrillic "х" (as in the word хорошо) to represent the letter "h", which doesn't exist in Russian. My invented cursive version looks like a back-to-front Roman "c".

My sweaty-browed weekly stammerings culminated in a glorious reward: five days in Moscow, during a time when the iron curtain was still firmly drawn shut. We ate blinchiki topped with sour cream and red caviar for breakfast every morning. My friend managed seven in one sitting. I was in awe. She was severely bulimic, which I didn't know at the time. It did, however, get her mother's attention.

We queued up in a bakery for half an hour and came out with two carrier bags full of mini-bagel shaped things that tasted of nothing and had the texture of recycled cardboard.

You asked for 2000g instead of 200g, didn't you? 

Next time, YOU do the talking!

Russian and I are on cautious terms. So far, our dates have been limited to a daily ten-minute frisson on Duolingo - four days and counting.

I have a confession to make: I ditched Italian for Russian. Poor Italian didn't see it coming. We had a two-day fling back in early October. Yes, you could say I led him on. But it's just not gonna work out for us right now. I've already got plenty on my plate with his rambunctious brothers, Spanish, Portuguese and French. There's waaaay to much Romance in my life! It's their verbs that get to me the most: there's fifty different versions for each and every one of them; different tenses, different moods - I cannot cope with another helping of this nonsense, I just can't.

Russian, on the other hand, bypasses superfluous verbiage altogether. "She my mother." "Where Park?" "Your father here." "This not bus. This taxi". Nothing could be more attractive to me right now. Darn it, Russian is roping me right in with his seductive straight talk!

Hoping For Fast Progress With Slow French

Last night, very late last night, I decided to startle my credit card by shelling out $159. Now, I'm usually quite stingy when it comes to throwing cash at language resources, especially since there's so much free stuff out there - and ESPECIALLY in major languages like French. Ah, but there is a caveat: although the interwebs are awash with free material, it usually caters for two groups: bare beginners and the very advanced, i.e. those who can watch films or listen to the radio without weeping in frustration. If you're an intermediate learner, though, it's a completely different ball game. You need input that challenges you, while, at the same time, being somewhat intelligible. And at that level, at least in my experience, it's a desert out there. Unless you're prepared to pay.

My hard-earned money went to newsinslowfrench.com. There's a new episode every week providing a selection of news & analysis (spoken slowly or at normal speed, you get to choose), plus a new French expression, a grammar lesson and quizzes for testing yourself. I paid for the premium version that includes everything, but there are a number of more economical options. If you just want the audio of the news section for listening practice, for example, it's something like fifty bucks a year. The back catalogue is so enormous that I won't get through it even if I managed to "process" an episode every day. Not such a bad deal for 13 bucks a month, methinks.

I didn't buy the cat in the bag, you understand. I am, in fact, a repeat customer. I subscribed to the Spanish version (newsinslowspanish.com) years ago, which created a little problem for me when I first moved to Spain. I knew so many Spanish sayings and expressions that people assumed I had a much higher level of conversational Spanish than I actually did.

I should probably also mention that I took out a six-month subscription to the French version a year ago, but it turned out to be too early - I was still very much a beginner back then and deciphering just a single news item was too much of a chore.

So, the plan is this: I want to get from upper beginner's to upper intermediate level within the next eighteen months or so. When I wrote a post last week about how much I was enjoying my Portuguese, I suddenly felt the urge to go there with my French. I shall let you know how it goes...

Want To Get Better At A Language? Just Ditch It For A While!

I've been back in Spain now for two weeks. And I've noticed a difference. A difference I'd read about. A difference other people had told me about. A difference I'd never really been conscious of myself before.

I suddenly feel a lot more at home in Spanish. The gap between what I want to express and what I can express has noticeably shrunk. The right turns of phrase come to me much more readily when I need them. I'm still not 100% there, but getting closer. It's only taken me... uhm... half a decade.

Most surprisingly of all, my French has also improved. Before my summer break in Germany, and after battling with the language for a year already, I was still virtually mute. I'm pathetic like that. I hate getting things wrong. I want to speak in well-constructed sentences. Or not at all.

So, on Wednesday, after having abandoned my French for the past two months, I dragged myself to my weekly French conversation group. I didn't want to go. I went only because I had promised Cristina, our formidable chieftain that I would be there, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

My performance was, as expected, as disastrous as ever. This prompted me, while the rest of the group were chatting away, to message Miranda, my French teacher, to fix an appointment for the next day.

It was in this 1-2-1 session, where we both noticed an improvement, Miranda and I. I seemed to catch much more of what she said, and I actually TALKED. Poorly, for sure, French people would have pelted me with mouldy madeleines for what I was doing to their language, but there was a conversation happening, and this was a bit of a break-through for me. For some reason, I felt less inhibited, more gung-ho about it all.

A friend of mine had once remarked to me how his Chinese took a leap forward every time he returned to China after a period of absence. I remember this comment because I thought it odd at the time. Surely, you'd be nothing but terribly rusty?! Never mind having missed out on weeks' or even several months' worth of exposure and learning experiences! How can a break from immersion possibly be beneficial...? It makes no sense. The brain works in mysterious ways...

Getting Back to Normal Life

I'm back in Spain after seven weeks of home leave in Bavaria. Great though it was to spend time with family and reconnect with old friends, part of me has been anxious to return to my routine. Anxious, in particular, to shuffle both French and Portuguese, which had been brushed to one side over the summer, back into the mix.

In an effort to resuscitate my derelict French, I've signed up for busuu.com (the free part). At rock bottom level. A1. This is just too easy, I'm thinking, as I whizz through the first section, and then I spell je m'appelle with one "p". Not so easy after all. A couple of episodes of dailyfrenchpod.com are meant to help me muster up the courage to re-instate my weekly 1-hour-long French lessons. I think I'll give myself another week's respite.

French conversation group starts again on the 13th. Cristina, our fierce and dedicated group leader, has maintained WhatsApp contact with me over the summer, maybe because she senses that I might jump ship at any point. She keeps us on a tight leash. That must be the reason that this group has been going for years, instead of disbanding after six months, as most of them do. Kudos to her.

On the Portuguese front, I'm watching kids' cartoons over lunch and I've received an email from my long-suffering Portuguese teacher. I've been ordered to her house for tomorrow morning. I already know what she's going to say about my deteriorating Portuguese, and it won't be flattering. I'll be armed with Austrian chocolates and a short essay which I'm going to write today. I'm also going to tell her that I've booked a weekend trip to her home town, Lisbon, for October.

Bavarian Authors And Surprise Discoveries

I try not to buy paper books anymore. Too heavy, too inconvenient, too demanding of shelf space. Considering my relapse rate, I'm just glad I'm not a crack addict. This week I picked up this little gem from the gift shop at Nymphenburg Palace (Munich):

It’s an anthology featuring 19^th and 20t century Bavarian Women Writers. I’m not quite sure which component of this book I love more – the short stories/extracts or the condensed biographies of the authors that accompany them. I’d never even heard of most of these writers who, evidently, formed a pivotal part of the cultural and literary landscape of their time, and often at great personal cost.

One of the most disturbing biographical snippets I’ve come across so far (and I’m only on page 71) is from the life of actress and best-selling author Wilhelmine von Hillern, born in 1836.

Aged just 17, Wilhelmine, neé Birch, becomes involved with theatre critic Hermann von Hillern. Shortly after discovering that their dalliance has not remained without consequences, the couple marries. However, this isn an era when any perceived infringements of society's strict moral code could lead to irreparable repercussions, and Wilhelmine’s mother fears that the swiftly drawn veil of holy matrimony won't suffice to safeguard her family's reputation. Not only does she impel the family to keep the birth of the child a secret, she also forbids her daughter to breastfeed her son, while squirting laxatives down his hungry little throat. Her plan is to pass off the emaciated child as a pre-term baby conceived in wedlock a few months down the line, but it all ends in terrible tragedy. 

Wilhelmine's intense feelings of guilt over the death of her infant son permeate deep into her body of work, and there is no doubt that the need to process this harrowing experience is part of what makes her one of the most compelling writers of her generation.

Change of topic. Kind of. A few days ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I’d let my study of French go to pot this summer. On second thought, however, I’m very much enjoying this current burst of exploration of the culture I was born into. And where better to engage with it than in situ, immersed as I am in the rural Bavarian summer with its long muggy days, surprise thunderstorms and the constant howl of combine harvesters droning on in the background? 

I’ll get back to my daily French practice soon enough. Sometimes I need to remind myself that it's perfectly OK to suspend one set of language activities for a while to make room for another. As long as the pursuit yields new insights and personal satisfaction, why go and ruin it for myself with a guilty conscience?

When A Change In Routine Wrecks Your Multilingual Practice

A break from the daily grind is a good thing. But not, as it turns out, for my French. I had promised myself I would, at the very least, listen to a French podcast every day, but, as usual under altered circumstances, I’ve done diddly squat.

I’ve been on semi-vacation at my mother’s place in Germany for just over one month now, with two weeks to go before I return to Spain and resume my normal life, which includes a weekly French lesson, French conversation group on Wednesdays and, of course, a daily drip feed of podcasts.

My Portuguese is also suffering. I’ve not been reading any Portuguese books lately, focusing instead on Spanish and German ones. Because, let’s face it, reading in languages you’re competent in is 100% pleasure and 0% effort, and this fits in very nicely with my being in lazing-about mode. Having said that, I’m still exchanging emails, albeit sporadically, with my friend and Portuguese teacher. These take me an embarrassing amount of time to write, but it's totally worth the effort as it keeps the language in the weekly mix, so to speak.

Spending such a large chunk of the summer removed from my usual environment drives it home to me once again just how easy it is for languages to fall by the wayside. Without the force of structured daily discipline behind me, a language that isn't integrated into my life in some meaningful way just slips down the back of the mental sofa. For me, the hook that keeps a language anchored firmly in my little sandbox is being able to use it with people who are close to me. 

French is by far my weakest language and therefore most at risk from (temporary) abandonment and rapid erosion. At present, chatting away in French with native speaker friends is still a distant dream. And the more I neglect my daily practice, I realise, the more distant it becomes. 

Well, no point whining... time to hatch a French-resuscitation plan… watch this space!