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 

My Spanish is far from flawless. Have I failed?

Six months ago, I left Spain without ever reaching the level of linguistic perfection that I set out to achieve when I moved there.

There are many reasons for this, which I will go into at some point. In this post, though, I want to sum up briefly what these six years in Spain have actually done for my Spanish.

I'd been studying Spanish on and off since I was a teenager, and despite a couple of flashy certificates, including several from the London Chamber of Commerce which I clinched sometime back in the nineties, I could never really hold any more than the most basic of conversations. I don't think we ever even touched on the subjunctive, which seems like a bad joke, considering that I was certified to dominate the language to an "Advanced Level."

Little did I know then that it would take another 20 years for my skills to actually warrant this kind of certification. My time in Spain has made all the difference. In a nutshell:

• I am now fluent in Spanish and can hold my own on any topic, even in a group in a noisy bar. I can listen, read and speak without having to translate in my head.
• I'm able to read books at normal speed. Novels, biographies, anything. I wont lie - the first five nearly gave me a brain haemorrhage, but after that, things shifted to that very enjoyable place where you get sucked right into the story, rather than labouring over the lines and having to look up every fifth word. I've got tons of Spanish books on my Kindle and I read in Spanish every day. 
• Besides books, I watch series for escapism, and there's tons of them freely accessible on RTVE (Radio Television Española). Best of all, they come with subtitles and transcripts! I don't need those to follow the plot, but I like having them turned on so that I can pick out the odd word or useful expression that's not yet part of my repertoire. Every time I watch an episode, I learn one or two things. But watching series is definitely a recreational activity and not "studying." 
• Spanish is now firmly part of my hard drive. I will never forget it like some language learnt at school or in an evening class. Nobody can take it away from me - it's always available and ready to use for enjoyable activities. 

And I've just realised another thing: there are even advantages to my Spanish not being perfect: It could serve as a tool to expand my social circle, which can be hard to do when you suddenly find yourself being part of "the older generation." So, I've been looking at evening classes for next semester, and I found a couple that might make fertile ground for getting to know new people. They are both advanced level Spanish (C1), centred around conversation and discussing current affairs. Taking an English class to make new friends would be just plain silly, and as for signing up for classes in other languages, I've come to the conclusion that having to focus intently on the various in-class exercises sucks up all of my energy - I have none left for putting on a be-my-friend face. I get so frustrated wrestling with the language that I shut down instead of engaging openly with my classmates. I feel that in a Spanish class, I'd be much more relaxed. Well, that's the theory... I shall report on how it's working (or not) in practice. 

Too Old To Learn A Language?

Instead of launching into long-winded cogitations on the topic of mature language learners, I'm going to share an article about British writer and translator Mary Hobson, whose story I find really inspirational.

The piece below was originally published in Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH):

‘Learning Russian has given me a whole new life’

April 22, 2016 YELENA BOZHKOVA

English writer and translator Mary Hobson decided to learn Russian at the age of 56, graduating in her sixties and completing a PhD aged 74. Now fluent in Russian, Hobson has  won the Griboyedov Prize and the Pushkin Medal for her translation work. RBTH visited Hobson at her London home to ask about her inspiring experience.

RBTH: Learning Russian is difficult at any age, and you were 56. How did the idea first come to your mind? 

Mary Hobson: I was having a foot operation, and I had to stay in bed for two weeks in hospital. My daughter Emma brought me a big fat translation of War and Peace. “Mum, you’ll never get a better chance to read it”, she said.

I’d never read Russian literature before. I got absolutely hooked on it, I just got so absorbed! I read like a starving man eats. The paperback didn’t have maps of the battle of Borodino, I was making maps trying to understand what was happening. This was the best novel ever written. Tolstoy creates the whole world, and while you read it, you believe in it.

I woke up in the hospital three days after I finished reading and suddenly realized: “I haven’t read it at all. I’ve read a translation. I would have to learn Russian.”

RBTH: Did you read War and Peace in the original language eventually?

M.H.: Yes, it was the first thing I read in Russian. I bought a fat Russian dictionary and off I went. It took me about two years. I read it like a poem, a sentence at a time. I learned such a lot, I still remember where I first found some words. “Between,” for instance. About a third of the way down the page.

RBTH: Do you remember your first steps in learning Russian? 

M.H.: I had a plan to study the Russian language in evening classes, but my Russian friend said: “Don’t do that, I’ll teach you.” We sat in the garden and she helped me to remember the Cyrillic script. I was 56 at this time, and I found it very tiring reading in Cyrillic. I couldn’t do it in the evening because I simply wouldn’t be able to sleep. And Russian grammar is fascinating.

RBTH: You became an undergraduate for the first time in your sixties. How did you feel about studying with young students?

M.H.: I need to explain first why I didn’t have any career before my fifties. My husband had a very serious illness, a cerebral abscess, and he became disabled. I was just looking after him. And we had four children. After 28 years I could not do it any longer, I had break downs, depressions. I finally realized I would have to leave. Otherwise I would just go down with him. There was a life out there I hadn’t lived. It was time to go out and to live it.

I left him. I’d been on my own for three years in a limbo of quilt and depression. Then I picked up a phone and rang the number my friend had long since given me, that of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University. “Do you accept mature students?” I asked. “Of sixty-two?” They did.

When the first day of term arrived, I was absolutely terrified. I went twice around Russel square before daring to go in. The only thing that persuaded me to do it was that I got offered the place and if I didn’t do it, the children would be so ashamed of me. My group mates looked a little bit surprised at first but then we were very quickly writing the same essays, reading the same stuff, having to do the same translations.

RBTH: You spent 10 months in Moscow as part of your course. How did you feel in Russia?

M.H.: I hardly dared open my mouth, because I thought I got it wrong. It lasted about a week like this, hardly daring to speak. Then I thought – I’m here only for 10 months. I shall die if I don’t communicate. I just have to risk it. Then I started bumbling stuff. I said things I didn’t at all mean. I just said anything. The most dangerous thing was to make jokes. People looked at me as if I was mad.

I hate to say it, but in 1991 the Russian ruble absolutely collapsed and for the first and last time in my life I was a wealthy woman. I bought over 200 books in Russian, 10 “Complete Collected Works” of my favorite 19th-century authors. Then it was a problem how to get them home. Seventy-five of them were brought to London by a visiting group of schoolchildren. They took three books each.

RBTH: You’re celebrating your 90th birthday in July. What’s the secret of your longevity? 

M.H.: If I had not gone to university, if I had given up and stopped learning Russian, I don’t think I’d have lived this long. It keeps your mind active, it keeps you physically active. It affects everything. Learning Russian has given me a whole new life. A whole circle of friends, a whole new way of living. For me it was the most enormous opening out to a new life.

Source: http://rbth.com/arts/literature/2016/04/22/learning-russian-has-given-me-a-whole-new-life_587093

*   *   *   *   *   * 

Before I embarked on my multilingual project, my goal was to speak five languages "really well". I'm not all that far off with my Spanish, but my Portuguese  –  and most definitely my French!  –  still need A LOT of work. By the time I get those to a decent enough level and have reached my goal of five, I'll be pushing the Big Five-O, age-wise.

Thing is, I can't really see myself stopping there. I know I'll want to go on learning languages, and I'll most likely be wanting a change from the Romance ones. Although I had dismissed it as an option for the longest time, Russian may well be on the cards. Or rather, a return to Russian, since I studied the language at school for a couple of years (thirty years ago, oh my!). I can still read and write Cyrillic, but everything else has evaporated. Besides a smattering of previous experience, another factor in its favour is relatively easy access to both people and country. Russia is just a short plane ride away, and there are plenty of native Russian speakers dotted about Europe. 

What I Talk About In German Book Club Whether I Want To Or Not

"What are the different words for 'testicles' in German"?

It's about five minutes before the close of this week's book club session when this question drops. Reproductive body parts did not feature this afternoon, neither in the book we've been reading, nor in any of the tangents the group discussion has gone off on. There are always tangents. But nobody does tangents quite like Horacio.

After a year and a half of weekly meetings - and Horacio never fails to show -  I'm still trying to get used to his non sequiturs. "Hoden," I tell him, "and the most common colloquial term is  'Eier', just like in Spanish: 'huevos' (eggs)".

He can't help it, you see. On the bell curve of neurotypical, he takes about the same position as Pluto does in our solar system: Way, waaaaaay out there. There's no guile in him (at least that's what I like to think), but he sure keeps me on my toes.

"Premature ejaculation," he blurts out in a session not too long ago while the rest of us are engaged in philosophical musings on the meaning of freedom,"How do you say that in German?" All eyes are on me, the only native German speaker present. My group mates try their hardest not to crack up. There's relief on their bemused faces - at least it's not them having to satisfy Horatio's thirst for knowledge.

On another occasion, Horatio desperately needs to know whether "[insert a term that can only have found its way into his vocab courtesy of frauleindoesfrankfurt.com]" was a common way of saying "to ejaculate" in German.

Curiously, when we are actually working up a sweat on our way through a racy passage and I'm in a BRING-IT-ON! frame of mind, ready to Bavarian-dialect-coach the entire cast of Ready Steady Fucktoberfest, Horatio chooses to keep shtum like a fish. I count my blessings, but deep down I know he's just waiting for the next time when we'll be comparing German vs. Spanish cemetery etiquette or examining the Teutonic penchant for separating trash into umpteen different categories. He's all for delayed gratification, our Horacio.

Why Terrible Books Can Be Terribly Useful

I’m 14% into Doce años y un instante by Anna Casanovas. It's awful. A romance novel of the sickliest kind. It's so predictable it hurts. The characters are plastic. A special kind of plastic that drips marshmallow juice. The male protagonist conforms to a long list of clichés - troubled boy breaks girl's heart, joins army, becomes "a real man", returns to put things right. In the meantime, his rejected love interest straps herself into a girdle to keep her feelings in. Because women suffer and men do stuff, right? Like I said, I'm only at 14% and I can already tell that it can only get worse. A whole lot worse.

The cover should have warned me - I swear,
I did't see it at the time when I bought this!
...and ... uhm ... "Casanovas"...?

I blame Amazon. It runs a daily special offer called “Kindle Flash”, which is rather a mixed bag. Sometimes I get lucky and fish out an excellent read, but this one's very much at the soppy bottom mingling with the sticky wrappers of half-liquefied cough drops. All I can say in my defence is that the summary sounded so much less painful than the reality. 

The author is quite enamoured with her creation. She has gone the extra mile to put the reader "in the mood": Every chapter starts with lyrics lifted from a famous love song. She has collated them all on a Spotify list, asking her readers in the preface to listen to these while reading.

But Simone, I hear you ask, why the hell are you reading this drivel in the first place, and why oh why are you whining on to us about it!?

A valid question. And you already know the answer to that one, don't you? The reason I'm persisting with this cheese fest is the language. And, in particular, the dialogue.

You see, when trying to internalise a language, I believe it is important to read widely and not limit oneself to the usual genres. I may really enjoy biographies of 19^th and 20^th-century scientists, historical novels and the occasional self-help book on how to improve my time management skills (my chances of turning myself into a 19th-century scientist are marginally better), but these don't do much for improving my witty chatting capabilities. 

For furthering conversational repertoire, you just can't beat novels set in the here and now, laced with everyday conversations centred around people's emotional debris and, dare I say it, a dash of hum-drum domesticity thrown in. Romance novels, as much as I abhor them as a genre, are great for this. 

Despite having lived in Spain for nearly half a decade and having had thousands of conversations, I still have so many aha! moments seeing written dialogue. Just today, for example, I learnt that "tres [meses] a lo sumo" means "three [months] at the most". How could something so basic have escaped me until now?! 

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!