I have recently found school very hard and I am especially struggling in Italian. For some reason, even though I try my best in my tests and studies, I still fail and get terrible grades. I find it overwhelmingly difficult to learn all the Italian vocabulary and sentence structures.
Thank you all for your prayers
I don’t know if this will be of any help. Hope it is.
When I went to college, two semesters of a foreign language were required. Three languages were available. I selected French simply because it was one of the choices. I knew nothing about it at all.
To my horror, when I started in French I as a freshman, I learned that everybody in the whole class had had French in high school but me. I quickly found that I simply didn’t “get it”. But it was required. You couldn’t graduate without it.
I decided the only thing I could do was memorize the conversations in the text like a poem…literally memorize them, word for word. Yes, I studied the grammar sections and the vocabulary sections, but my main approach was brute memorization. It worked because the grammar was used in the context of the conversations. So was much of the vocabulary. I found that the memorization worked. It was hard and took an enormous amount of time, but it worked.
Later I figured out that, of course, that’s how all language is learned. Babies don’t study grammar. They don’t study lists of vocabulary words. They learn them all in context and they “fish out” from their memories pieces of what they have heard and understood in order to eventually put sentences together themselves. And, by the time they are three or four, if their parents’ grammar is bad, theirs will be bad. If their parents’ grammar if flawless, theirs will be too. And, the grammar and word usage in the French text conversations were also flawless. So, I “learned it right” just like a baby.
Ultimately, I progressed and took two additional semesters of it, just because, by then I liked it.
Hope it helps.
I never did study Italian, and always regretted that I never had the opportunity, because the language is so beautiful. I did, at one time, think maybe I could learn a bit of it by laboriously slogging through Dante’ 'Divine Comedy" and simply memorizing. I had to give it up eventually because it took so much time. I was no longer a student then and had other things to do. But I always remembered at least the first lines, which (at my age) I have come to think meaningful. Perhaps later in life you will too. It might be a bit archaic, but I don’t think it’s terribly so.
“Nel mezzo del cammin’ di nostra vita,
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la dirritta via era la smarritta.
Ah! Quanto a dire qual e cosa dura!”
“In the middle of life’s road,
I found myself in a dark wood,
Where the direct way was hidden from me.
Ah! How to tell of the difficulty of it!”
Beautiful! The unspoken thought of every middle aged man. I have thought of it as one of my “ways of thinking about life.” Being lost and looking for the right path, which we do over and over again in life.
May God aid you in your endeavors.
