St. Thomas perspectives abroad: Siena

SIENA, Italy — I have chosen a seemingly impossible task for myself: learning new names for every object, idea and descriptor that I ever use. And then some.

As someone whose major depends on the capacity to express myself clearly, deliberately ridding myself of my linguistic ability is a blow. My skills in English mean nothing.

Photo courtesy of Elena Neuzil.
Photo courtesy of Elena Neuzil.

Still, this is the challenge of learning another language. My language of choice is Italian; I’m studying abroad in the city of Siena. I want to say that I’ll be fluent when I come home.

As I’ve been studying here, though, I’m realizing how vague a goal fluency really is. How can I possibly measure that?

Before I went abroad, I thought fluency was the ability to speak with relative ease on nearly any subject. But merely using the words I already know to describe complicated subjects does not mean I’m fluent, just that I can apply what I know to new situations. My Italian host family regularly asks me to defend my opinions on a huge variety of topics, and I’m able to cobble together responses even without knowing key words. For example, we discussed the death penalty without me actually knowing the phrase for the punishment. (It’s “pena di morte,” if you were wondering.)

The poetic definition is that fluency is achieved when the learner begins to dream in the language, but I’ve found this to be untrue as well. I had a dream recently that I was taking an oral exam and had to introduce myself. (“Hi, my name is Elena, and I’ve studied Italian for two and a half years.”) An introduction, though, doesn’t demonstrate fluency at all because these are the kinds of words one learns during the first week. Would I have to dream in the most complicated grammatical structures about the most obtuse topics to prove fluency?

The most accurate definition might be the ability to think in the language. If my Italian could keep up with the speed of thought, I would be satisfied indeed, although thoughts are so flighty that they’re often more impressions than words.

For me, fluency might be dependent on my perspective. If I read an Italian book and encounter an unknown word, I reach for the dictionary and resign myself to how far I still have to go. But if I read “Great Expectations” and don’t know a word, I just look it up. My slight lack of knowledge doesn’t make me doubt my ability.

Still, even if my goal is vague, that doesn’t make it irrelevant. People set vague goals all the time – to be kinder, for instance – and they can still take little steps to achieve them.

If my little steps can include chatting with baristas, arguing about the death penalty and learning curse words from my host dad, then I’m satisfied with my ill-defined goal.

Onward!