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Language Lessons
Jan. 5th, 2012 12:18 pmA few years back I was mucking around some genealogy website and I turned up a distant cousin in Italy who was very enthusiastically assembling a family history. It was hard to communicate with him because he would write almost exclusively in Calabrese, which Google translate almost recognizes as Italian. The Internet is an amazing place; the tools are there -- it's just that I was the only one using them. I translated his emails to English (or almost English) so I could read them, and I translated mine to Italian so he could read them.
He had a million questions that I didn't know the answers to, so I passed him along to my sister, who is much more into genealogy than I am. He ended up writing a book of our family history -- in which he complained that I ditched our correspondence! Apparently there are some finer points to Italian communication that I was unaware of.
Skip ahead a few years, and there is Facebook. Here he is again, writing in almost-Italian (and usually with capslock). And I'm back to translating everything and hoping I'll make myself clear. I suppose eventually I will be fluent in at least reading and writing in Italian, even if I never learn to speak it!
He had a million questions that I didn't know the answers to, so I passed him along to my sister, who is much more into genealogy than I am. He ended up writing a book of our family history -- in which he complained that I ditched our correspondence! Apparently there are some finer points to Italian communication that I was unaware of.
Skip ahead a few years, and there is Facebook. Here he is again, writing in almost-Italian (and usually with capslock). And I'm back to translating everything and hoping I'll make myself clear. I suppose eventually I will be fluent in at least reading and writing in Italian, even if I never learn to speak it!
