English

The London pictures are uploading. Yesterday was the second part of the guest lecture in Economics on the Great Recession. It was more or less a simplified version of Michael Lewis' The Big Short. I really enjoyed it. It was given by an Italian Economics professor who at one time was one of the top consultants to the EEC (European Economic Community) and EMU (Economic and Monetary Union of the EU). The dude knows his stuff. It was his first time giving the lecture to Americans, so I think he used weaker words to describe how America's love of spending money they don't have impacts the world.

Hearing the perspective of America from a very intelligent and somewhat influential economist was much more interesting than him listing the different steps of the American financial crisis, which took up the last 45 minutes. The way he described New York City sounded just like the way an American would describe Paris.

He also mentioned how fortunate we are to be from a native English-speaking country. We actually had a discussion about English in Italian class today. My instructor said English was the easiest language for her to learn out of the five she knows. A good example would be the verb "go" which is "andare" in Italian.

I go - you go - he/she goes - we go - you go - they go

Translating these phrases into Italian requires much more thought than translating from Italian to English.

Io vado - tu vai - lui/lei va - noi andiamo - voi andate - loro vanno

Italian is much more complicated. Translating into the "imperfetto" is the hardest part of Italian so far.

I went to school in California = Andavo a scuola in California
Yesterday, I went to school = Ieri, sono andato a scuola

Distinguishing whether an event was continuous or happened at a certain point can be molto difficile. My Italian has gotten much better though. On cab ride back from the airport after the London trip, the cab driver was very chatty. Max and I did a surprisingly good job of keeping the conversation going. I'm not fluent, but if I wasn't attending an English school and didn't hangout with Americans, I'd definitely be fluent by now.

My Italian instructor also said Americans learn very little about grammer, so learning languages for us is much harder. Grammer is drilled throughout elementary and middle school here in Italy. Italian students must also study Latin and Greek. Doing this would be impossible if they didn't study grammer much more than Americans.

The econ guy was right that we're lucky to speak the international language of finance and economics, but being multilingual can be one of the most useful things in the world. Americans aren't forced to speak more than one language, unfortunately.