Under the Pressure....

When I first decided to try to teach myself Italian this was the first thing I read:-

'There are four types of REGULAR verbs:

One with infinitives ending in -ARE, one with infinitives ending in -ARE

 and two with infinitives ending in -IRE'

Jesus!, It made absolutely no sense and made me cringe with cranial cramps.

It's like Cryptophasia but your on your own!...(I will wait for you to google it!)

Are you back?.....then Andiamo!

It also made me think back to the poor woman that tried to teach me CSE French and I remember thinking at the time as to why this woman was trying to teach me these ridiculous foreign words as I would NEVER be going that far from home? 

Needless to say I failed, but if the need ever arose I could always tell someone in the Dordogne that had lost their cat that,  ' it was behind the house' in fluent French, albeit with a Lancashire twang!

A few months on and some of it is starting to sink in; my useless suede can now retain a few simple words and even transfer them to speech on occasions. This is how it has to be as there is nothing more important than being able to communicate in the native tongue.

I've been in many places around the world being only able to point at stuff, while making chicken noises and animatedly flapping a pair of pretend wings, stood in the middle of a market trying to hopefully buy some lunch and I can tell you that you feel a right cock!

So, I need to learn the lingo.

But it's damn hard...Molto bloody hard!

Why did the Romans have to make it so screamingly difficult?

What did the Romans ever do for us?

Rules of pronunciation....that's one thing they did, then they threw in Consonants, double consonants, stress, Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, verbs, adverbs, Masculines, feminines, transgender plural Irregularities...to name but a few!

Turning the pages of the basic beginners ladybird book of 'Italian for thick northern chumps' it looked like a big bowl of alphabetti spaghetti had been poured on to the pages to me and after hours and hours of studying, very little was sinking in. My poor brain found itself under pressure and was being overloaded with incomprehensible Aggettivi Possessivi articles and 'Il Passato prossimo'... the past tense, tormenting and taunting me every night.

Slowly, slowly words started to be remembered, with regular sessions being the key.

The numbers, the greetings, then the verbs...what was masculine?, what was feminine?

and soon it was starting to make a little bit more sense.

At least it's a start, at least now it will allow me to order a drink, maybe buy some food and perhaps say ta-ra to someone without sounding like a prize pollock!

But there is a long, long way to go.....

'Under the Pressure' is the title track of a brilliant album called 'Lost in the Dream' by The War on Drugs from 2014 and comes highly recommended.

Sent from my iPad