How Italy Improved My English | Hacker News Reader

How Italy Improved My English

nybooks.com

27 pointspepys10 comments

I am Italian, I live abroad and mostly speak English since ~8 years. The "issue" I face is that the dialect version of my Italian feels easier and easier, but I believe I still kept a good written version of the language. Few years back I spent 1 year in Spain - I had serious issues communicating in Italian during that time. I think as long as your foreign language is very different, you are good, if it's similar, not so much.

Edit. Ok, to tell the truth, I don't feel very compelled to maintain a good spoken Italian. On the other hand, I do want to keep my written version as sharp as possible.

Same for me.

I'm Italian, lived in UK for a few years, and I have problems with Standard Italian, so much that often I use English grammar in Italian or I have to Google translate from English to Italian for words.

Also, I noticed as well that my home dialect is getting stronger than Standard Italian, although I lived in another part of Italy for almost 10 years.

I'm Italian as well and I understand forgetting a few words, but losing the ability to speak Italian properly in just a few years sounds too much...

I had this problem after an extended time in South America. Learning Portuguese almost totally destroyed my spoken Spanish, even though I can still read it fine. I even had to stop some "carioca" accent features because they were making it into Spanish.

P.S. You may find it useful that "since 8 years" is awkward in English, "for 8 years" would be preferred.

Is it me, or does this writer, use far, far too many, commas?

It might be. Italians use commas with the frequency English-speakers use periods (dots). You might be making his point, really.

Fascinating. Reminds of reading Caesar, who used so many commas and had sentences which were fairly difficult to unpack. (At least that's how it seemed when I was in high school.) Wonder if that's a cultural thing which has been inherited through all these years.

Most educated Italians are still forced to study Latin as teenagers (although numbers have shrunk in the last decade or so). And of course, Romans invented lawyers...

Seriously, once you look for it, you see it very clearly. You can usually spot Italians writing in English for their overuse of "the", their sentence length, and a higher frequency of passive verbs. If it feels like that but the number of "the"s is correct, the only explanation is that you are reading Ian McEwan.

I am Italian and my English teacher always used to tell me that I used too many commas.

Also, I didn't notice anything off while reading the post.

It could definitely be influence from the Italian language.

I confirm that commas are much more common in Italian than in English.

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