The Bakersfield Voice

All > News
Learn a Little Italian - Have Some Fun!
Topics: Italian language, Language learning, fun, Bakersfield, Education
Posted by windowlady2 Sun Mar 2, 2008 17:02:00 PST
Viewed 103 times
0 responses 0 comments Location: 4415 Wilson Road, Bakersfield, CA 93308

 

Ciao a tutti! (Hello, Everyone!) Perhaps you have two hours during your week to set aside for a little mental fun/exercise. Are you recently retired? Maybe you’re planning a trip to Italy. Who knows? At any rate, beginning on March 13, Bakersfield’s Italian Heritage Dante Association will sponsor an Italian language class, “Basic Italian”, on Thursday mornings at the association’s meeting hall at 4415 Wilson Road, on the south side of Wilson Road, in front of the lovely Italian gardens and across from Stine School.

 

This course will start at 11:30 a.m. and go until 1:00 p.m. You will receive instruction emphasizing conversation along with information about modern Italian culture, and just a little Italian grammar.  You will hear and learn some songs in Italian; practice talking with your classmates; read, speak and write Italian. Laugh in Italian! For more information, please call the Italian Heritage Dante Association Hall, at 831-0867 or Lis Sierra (that’s me) at 665-1978.

 

My eventual move to teaching Italian comes from my family history. During my last year of high school I opened the Italian textbooks for the course that my mother was studying—she spoke only the Italian dialect of Sicily as a child—and began teaching myself Italian. California high schools in the Central Valley during the 1960s did not offer Italian as one of their foreign languages.

 

During my first year at college I wrote—laboriously, with dictionary and grammar book in hand—a few letters to my Sicilian grandmother, in Italian. She was overjoyed—and proudly boasted to friends that her granddaughter had written to her –in Italian! As the years flew by, I laid aside my studies of Italian and focused on communicating with the primary immigrant population of California in Spanish. Only occasionally would I pick up an Italian language textbook and make a feeble attempt at learning a small number of words.

 

Some years ago my husband and I enjoyed our first trip to Italy; for months before our actual passage we practiced, listening to Italian language tapes and CDs, writing and practicing “typical” dialogues in Italian; and naming objects in our home or at the dinner table—all in preparation for the trip. Ultimately we were received in Venice—our first Italian venue—with many inquiries about whether or not we were from Spain—our Italian was pretty shaky at best! After that vacation, having determined to learn to speak Italian more fluently, I enrolled in the Italian language course at our local Italian Heritage Dante Association hall.

 

I became a member of the Italian Heritage Dante Association, and later assumed the responsibility of raffle chairperson at the annual Italian festa; I became a member, then vice president for a time, of the IHDA Board of Directors. Our Italian classes were fun, although not always well attended. Eventually the instructor left us, as did another, who stayed with us for a year or so before also leaving us. Finally, we students were left without an Italian language teacher in the Bakersfield area.

 

Years previously I had been a member of Laubach Literacy International-Kern Adult Literacy Council. The motto of founder Frank Laubach was “each one teach one,” meaning that as soon as a person could read and write, s/he should, in turn, pass along the skills to another not yet so privileged. Frank’s creed became my own—I had taught English as a Second Language for many years, taking much pleasure in helping others to speak a second or even a third language other than their native tongue.

 

In short, now was my chance; I believed I could teach “the basics” to those that needed at least enough knowledge to get started speaking Italian on their first trip to Italy, or to help people begin to discover the language of their grandparents. A mentor in the Italian Heritage Foundation—an octogenarian who himself was unfortunate not to learn Italian from his own Italian parents—encouraged me to write a proposal for an Italian language course at the Italian Heritage Dante Association; it was accepted, and I have been teaching Basic Italian since January 2006.

 

Send to a Friend

Report a Violation