Parli italiano?

Back in August, before I landed myself in the middle of this cultural crash course, I thought the Italian language would come easily.
My timeline:
October- no longer need my dictionary
November-be able to make jokes and (more importantly) understand sarcasm
December- lose the American accent
January- be fluent

I've been in Italy for a little over two months now and I can honestly say that this timeline was horrifically unrealistic. Fluency is a hard term to define. Some people say your fluent when you start dreaming in another language. Others say your fluent when you think in the language while your awake. At this point both of those things seem farther away than everyone back at home.
There are some things that have gotten easier. I am no longer nervous to speak. I don't translate every sentence in my head from English to Italian. I can actually use direct object pronouns naturally (though my agreement is probably off).
And while I do love working on my language skills, sometimes my brain just wants to turn off. It's still work for me. I can't just naturally surround myself with all things in Italian because, by the end of the day, I would want to curl up in a dark room with a soothing rain soundtrack playing in the background. It's incredible how easy it is to just speak in your own language. I have never really thought about how simple we make it seem when words just pour out of our mouths. But the contrast between that and the mud slide I sludge through every day definitely gets frustrating.

But then, I decided to travel. First, I went to Ljubljana, Slovenia over Halloween weekend. I think you can tell from that name (which is utterly unpronounceable) that I was immediately shocked by the language barrier. I couldn't even understand which sign meant "train station," something that is totally natural to me now in Italian.

We did find end up finding the train station on our way to Lake Bled and found a cabin with an old un-intimidating Slovenian woman. I thought she would just ignore us for the whole train ride since we were clearly obnoxious English speakers. She didn't seem to notice. The whole ride was an odd mixture of smiling, nodding, pointing at windows, opening them, closing them, laughing politely and then doing it again. She continued to speak at us in Slovenian even though we responded with "We don't speak Slovenian". Clearly, that didn't work though since we didn't say it in Slovenian. She even offered us some grapes near the end of the trip. Though, we didn't accept them because she accompanied her offer with a garbled sentence that could have very easily been translated into "I don't want these. I think I found a worm in one."


Slovenia was nothing compared to Hungary. I went to Budapest the next weekend and gave up all hope of communicating without seeming touristy in Eastern Europe. Did you know that Hungarian has 44 letters in it's alphabet and is the fifth hardest language in the world to learn? Even numbers are confusing! We spent an afternoon at the famous thermal springs and learned the hard way what "freezing cold" means translated into Celsius.

While I loved both of these Eastern European countries, what I was most excited about was the prospect of coming home to a place where I could speak the language. I may not be fluent or even close to it, but I know so much more about Italian than I did two months ago. And the best part is...I still have 8 months left! Maybe if I get bored of Italian I can try to pick up some Hungarian in my spare time...

                                            The main square of Ljubljana. The city only has
                                                 270,000 inhabitants. In other words...tiny.

                                           Lake Bled. An absolutely gorgeous day of hiking.
                                            If you want to live the Lord of the Rings. Go to
                                               Slovenia. Their national animal is a dragon.

                                               Parliament on the River Danube in Budapest.

 

                                             Reason number 1,000,001 why I love Budapest:
                                           Tickets to an Rigoletto in this world famous opera
                                             house. For only 1 euro. The only downside was
                                                 that it was sung in Italian with subtitles in
                                              Hungarian, so I couldn't really understand it.