What's that you're saying?

It's like the French -- to steal further from the old Steve Martin bit -- have a different word for everything.

Before our trip Michelle and I brushed up a bit on our Italian and it really helped. We both knew a little already, and after a couple of months of using the computer software, listening to the "Phrase-a-Day" podcasts and drilling each other with the flash cards, we were starting to feel comfortable with the language. Far from fluent, but definitely able to pick out a few important words in a conversation and to make ourselves understood.

Plus the Italians are famously generous toward any lame attempt to speak their language. Stammer something practically insensible with your thick American accent -- "I has well coffee!" -- and people will stop and applaud with wonder. My God, you speak beautiful Italian! Michelle, especially, was complimented all the time.

In Paris, different story.

Michelle had a couple years of high school or college French but she didn't do any review at all, and I've never been able to speak or read a word. All those extra vowels and x's and silent letters. ... I get nervous asking for a croissant, and that's here in Seattle. I also had this notion that French people were snooty and unforgiving about stupid Americans' ignorance of their beautiful language.

Gauche -- that's a French word, right?, and the one I can pronounce! -- that's how I figured I'd feel every time I opened my mouth. On that much, I was right.

On our first night in Paris, after getting checked into our hotel we decided to walk around our awesome Latin Quarter neighborhood (that's the 5th Arrondissement, don't ask me how to say it), and look for something to eat. We settled on a nice looking fish place called La Criee. From the moment we walked in I was lost. The staff didn't speak any English, Michelle's brave attempts at French weren't being understood and there was only one word on the menu, "vin," about which I could make a reasonable guess. We ended up pointing to a couple of things and hoping. I ended up with a platter with two whole trout-sized fish laid out, heads, tails, bones all in place, no side dishes or other attempts at presentation.

Who knows, maybe deux carcasses is a French delicacy and La Criee is the new Ritz, but it didn't really do it for me. Michelle ate her meal and helped with mine and claimed to like it. It must be me, I thought, a big American baby, but for the rest of the trip I referred to that place as "The Crying Fish."

The people at The Crying Fish were nice, we just had a language barrier. OK, no prob. The next day, we tried a little cafe on the main boulevard in the neighborhood, a prime tourist area, and asked in Michelle's game but broken French for a table. The host literally looked down his nose at us.

"Oh," he said, "I can see we're going to need the English menus."

How do you say "what a dick" in French?

A proposito (that's Italian for "by they way"), I found that French people even clear their throats in French. The first time I noticed it was on a bus one day when a middle-aged man in a business suit and hat cleared his throat. Instead of something like "ahem," imagine Pepe le Pew laying on a thick "hnn-hnn-hnn-HUHHHNNN." It was awesome, and I heard others doing the same thing on the street; I've been clearing my throat that way ever since.

All of this, by the way (class: in Italiano?) isn't meant to disparage the Parisians or belittle our time there, which I loved. If anything, the language snootiness loosened me up. I'm not going to please anyone anyway, I figured, so why sweat it. I'm just saying.

And anyway, by the end of our short week in Paris I was able to say good morning and order my favorite breakfast treat, a pain aux raisin -- "pan ah ray-zahn," was my approximation -- and get served too. Tasty, in any language.

Bonjour.

Today is ...

It seems like Michelle got tired of praying for a verb and posting an Italian word of the day. So I'll pick up today -- "oggi" means today -- by repeating what I just heard on my My Daily Phrase Italian podcast.

Today we learned days of the week.

Today, Thursday is giovedi. Oggi e giovedi.

Domani, Friday, is venerdi.

Then sabato, domenica, lunedi, martedi, mercoledi and back to giovedi.

That's all for today. Tutti per oggi. Buona notte e grazie.

i biscotti

That's "the cookies" to you and me.

When I was a kid, my Grandma Matassa used to make these amazing Sicilian treats around the holidays and sometimes send us some from New York. They were sort of S-shaped cookies -- baked dough with a little sprinkle of powdered sugar on the outside, with a dark, fig and nut filling that wasn't quite sweet but was totally delectable. Well, I thought so anyway, and my dad, and I think my sister Lisa. I'm not sure anyone else really liked them.

Around our house these cookies were called something that sounded like "goojidahda." You never quite knew on the Italian pronunciation, as nothing was every written down, everything just spoken in what at best was a broken, second-generation Sicilian dialect that probably wouldn't have passed muster on Long Island, let alone Italy.

Anyway, I hadn't had the cookies for years, decades probably, until last Christmas when I was still recovering from surgery and Mom sprung a surprise package on us. Delicious. We tore through the entire box and it was one of the highlights of the season. I even looked up the spelling -- il cuccidato, for one cookie, or i cuccidati for the plural. So Dad's pronunciation was pretty close: cooch-ee-daht-ee.

Last week, I received a box in the mail from Eugene, marked "fragile" on the brown postal paper. I mentioned it to Mom and she said I was supposed to open it right away, not wait until Christmas. Even so, I let it sit for a week, thinking I'd wait until we got a Christmas tree.

Then last night I was flipping through a catalog and saw a picture of some fig cookies and a light bulb went off. I opened the box and sure enough: cuccidati!

Man, these are some yum holiday treats, especially with a glass of red wine or a good, strong cup of coffee. They'll never last until Christmas.

Thanks Mom! You should tell M&M-ville how to make them.

Che cosa?

Allora, Michelle!

Dove l'italiano per oggi?

St. Jerome is a fraud

I prayed to the patron saint of translators for a verb, but still no dice. Another noun: inglese.

As you surely can guess, that means English.

Now, week in review. Without looking back, go to the comments and give me the words for silk, directions, belly, pepper, party, winter and train.

Today I tried St. Jude

But still no dice. Another noun.

La seta. Silk. As in, "I went to la festa on il treno with a seta scarf covering il mio giant ventre. Mark say, hey, pass il pepe."


Oops. Didn't manage to get le indicazioni in there.


PS: Well darn. I see what I'm doing wrong. All along I should have been praying to St. Jerome, the patron Saint of Translators. Tomorrow I will try him.

I prayed to St. Christopher for a verb

But all I got was this stupid noun. At least it's a noun we can all relate to: Il ventre. No, not the ventricles. This means "the belly." As in, man, I ate all that delicious bread and jam and now look at my giant il ventre! I blame Kaye."

Today's word is... le indicazioni

That means directions, or information.

As in, "can you give me directions to a casino that is not full of idiots who call three bets cold and catch impossible cards on the river, and take all of your money?"

Mom, can you translate that for me?

l'inverno

Yes friends, that's the l'italiano word for the day. Mark guessed it meant fire. I was thinking it was kind of inferno-ey looking myself.

But in fact, our word for today l'inverno, l'inverno, l'inverno ...

Means winter.

Freda, can you make a sentence out of party, pepper and winter?

l'italiano

The word for today is la festa.

Yes my friends, this does mean Party. Also "holiday."

I swear I didn't cheat.

The use it in a sentence challenge today goes to Janice. Make it up if you have to.

Il Pepe

Okay, today we start our daily Italian vocabulary word feature. I have a box of 1,000 vocabulary words, and every night I will dip, without looking, into the box for our new word. Today the word is "Il pepe."

Noun: pepper (spice)


Il pepe. Maybe Kaye can use it in a sentence. I don't know enough words yet.

Learning Italian from A Scot

A little more on the My Daily Phrase Italian podcast.

I love this podcast because it's so weirdly quirky -- and yet helpful. The teacher is a guy named Mark (good name) who is either a Scottish guy with a great Italian accent, or an Italian guy who learned his English in Scotland. Either way, no way was I expecting a Sco'ish accent from an Italian teacher. It's eerily doubly foreign to have this Sco'ish bagpipe sounding guy repeating over and over again "Buon Giorno. Buoooon ... Gi-ooorrrrrnno. Buon Giorno." And then going into his Sco'ish banter.

One of the guys who reviewed the podcast on ITunes (rave reviews, from one and all) says it best: It's like learning Italian from Shrek. Har! I was more thinking it made me feel like that Scottish comedian Billy Connelly is teaching me Italian.

I went over to Radio Lingua Network, which does the podcasts, to see if they had more info about this guy (mainly I'm trying to figure out if he's Sco'ish or Italian) and I found this. Looks like maybe Mark is Sco'ish. If so, he's got a great Italian accent.

Anyways, I'm on lesson 13 now, and hit my first stumbling block. It's too bad one of the hardest things to say in Italian is "can you repeat that please?!"

Correction: Apologies, dear readers. We provided the wrong link in an earlier post about this. We now have the correct link in both posts.