Sono a Milano: Italian Class

Sono a Milano: Italian Class

It's been a week since my language classes started and I'm hoping my Italian has improved somewhat by now...actually I'm pretty sure it has, except for my pronunciation which is still lousy coz I still pronounce it the English way. Everyone in my class seems to speak Italian really fluently mainly coz they're super multi-lingual and majority of them speak Espagnole (oops...Spanish) which is very similar to Italian. There are heaps of Portugese in my class and portugese is similar to Italian too. I'm probably the worst in the class coz it takes me way longer than everyone else to understand when the lecturers speak fast. I can read and write it way better than I can speak or hear it. I'm thinking maybe I should have tranferred one class down coz apparently I'm in the highest level of the elementary classes (there are 4 levels of elementary classes). I must have done pretty well in that italian proficiency test they gave us before classes began to be placed in a class higher up, but then again it was a written test...

When they said it was an intensive course, they really meant intensive. We have classes everyday from 11.30am to 4.30pm with only a half hour lunch break in between sometime at 2pm!! It's insane really...at least my teachers are nice and they give us half an hour, some classes only get 15 mins (but everyone just takes 45mins...the 'italian' 15 mins). The other day we had to go for this "special lesson" on the italian economy, whereby it's a mass lecture and we nearly didn't get a lunch break at all coz italian class was supposed to run from 11.30am to 2.30pm so a 5hr lesson was supposed to be condensed into 3hrs and then the special lesson would run from 2.30pm to 4pm thereabouts. Honestly the schedule is insane! Actual classes are gonna begin on Tuesday and then we'll be having the language classes everyday from 6 to 8pm so I'm not quite looking forward to that. I don't even get these kinda hours back home!!

One wouldn't expect these kinda crazy hours from Italians, considering that if you go out every night the bars and clubs are always crowded. Restaurants and pizzerias are opened till 2am every night and clubs open till much later. Just seeing all the people out at night, one would think that Italians never seem to need to work...I mean it's kinda hard going to work in the morning when you've been out partying late aye? Well at least for me...