2024-08-27
I've settled on a trip to Italy this year. I am going to go to Bologna - I will fly in from London City into Florence, and then catch a train to Bologna. The reason why, is that the flights direct to Bologna appear only to be from Heathrow, and I really don't want to have to go to Heathrow. So I'll go to City airport, which is a much more pleasant airport experience (or was, when I went there last, which was many years ago now!)
The pain would be that I will probably have to go via a big airport when I go to Norway early next year, but hey.
It won't be too expensive, though flights are pricier than what I thought. It will be about £240 for the flights, then probably £400 or so for accomodation, and I'll be eating out for basically every meal, so I can budget about £300 in food I reckon (maybe less. I think food in Italy is cheaper than over here). So all in all, about £1000 max. It's fairly pricey, but at the same time it is a holiday, and it will be fun! First holiday abroad in a very long time.
I'm not sure what I will do in Bologna, but I think it will be quite nice. I can have a day in Florence as well if I want, but will probably stay in Bologna for most of it. I will explore it well, and try to avoid the busier cities. The reason why I chose Bologna not Florence or Rome is because I want to avoid the places that are too busy. I dislike tourists, or places that cater too much to tourists.
If I go in mid-October, I've a month, maybe a month and a half, to try to learn a bit of Italian before I go. I haven't done any language learning in a quite long while, but I will try to do what I can. It will involve listening to podcasts (Easy Italian exists, so I may use that), studying the grammar, reading, and so on.
I think it'll be nice to learn Italian though. It will also benefit me if I actually learn Latin at one point - I did start, but didn't really end up keeping it up. If I could learn Italian, it would help a lot with Latin as well. The grammar appears fairly easy to manage: nouns do not decline for case, only gender and number; verbs conjugate for person, tense and mood but only with about four or five verbal paradigms I have to remember (present, past, future, subjunctive I think it was). Once I've got the word order, pronunciation, etc. down, which will require practice, I can do decently well in terms of progress I think in a month. I can write in my journal in Italian, perhaps try to write wv in Italian if I am able to... I think essentially I will need to have Italian be a major focus until I go on holiday, and will hopefully be able to speak a little bit when I'm there.
The usual estimate is what? 120 hours to get good at a language? I have a month and a half, so would need to spend three hours a day on Italian to get to that level. I could theoretically do that: two hours of Italian podcasts (listen to on the train, walks, etc.), an hour of reading, maybe, an hour of studying grammar. Entirely possible. But I have many other things I want to do in terms of time, and so...
It seems that time management is a problem again. Even as I write, it is dark, (well it becomes dark now very early, owing to the time of year) and I have still guitar to study... and I'm writing wv instead! My, I write wv too much and take too long to write it too. But I'm not sure if it's really possible to do all that I want to do in terms of time, knowing also that I have studying, and work, and social occasions, etc. all also. I guess there must be a way to do it, but at the moment I do think I lead a very haphazard life, and the idea of managing or perfectly planning isn't really going to cut it. I think, the way that I am adopting, where I try to do a certain thing X number of times in a month is better, of course, because it gives me the ability to do it more when I have more time and less when I don't, within the space of the month.
Just a note on the Italian language as I've been hearing quite a bit today. I find it very beautiful! French is nice as well, but it really does sound very nice... perhaps it's just a dialect, as I heard some Italians in the cafe the other day and found it quite ugly, and didn't find it especially fascinating when I heard Italian spoken at a call at work once (I couldn't understand just about any of it). But hearing it from Easy Italian, it really does sound nice. Maybe it's a dialect thing, I'm not too sure. It just has a lovely flow to it, almost as if it does not break or have any awkward "out of place" syllables but is neatly structured whatever the sentence.
I guess I'll get to know it in more detail if I do study it in depth for the next while, so I'll get to learn. I think the main sticking points are going to be where the accent is placed (it seems a bit random at times: for instance, sapere has the stress on the second syllable, but conjugations of this have it in different places: sappia'mo, sape'te, sa'nno, sapeva'te, sape'vano - I imagine there is maybe something in the verb conjugation itself that does this, or maybe it is just an irregular example). I think gender will be fine as it is marked quite clearly on the nouns anyways so does not require too much memorisation I don't think (may well be wrong), but trying to pick up listening in only a month is a tall order and I might not do very well. Well, I'll try, and see how it goes.
Have a good one!