If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that they used to speak a language but then didn’t use it enough and then lost it, I’d have at least a few nickels. While I always take these comments with a grain of salt, as people’s interpretations of “speaking a language” vary greatly, I always find them interesting. For me, not using Italian seems like the most foreign and bizarre concept, practically inconceivable. Knowing the amount of time and effort that goes into learning a language renders this concept even more unfathomable. While my great passion for the Italian language does play a role in my usage of the language, my continual engagement with my language goes beyond that.
Before diving into the Italian language, I did a lot of research into language learning and acquisition- much more than the average person. From this, I learned that incorporating the language as much as possible into one’s is a key to successfully learning a language. As my abilities with the language began to grow and my knowledge began to take hold, it became not only easier to incorporate Italian into my life but a natural progression and the logical next step forward. By now, 4 years after having started my journey, I interact with the language every few minutes thinking nothing of it.
One of the smaller things that I did but nonetheless an important thing was set my phone’s language to Italian. We spend hours a day on our phones. Checking them easily several times per hour, and quite possibly tens to over a hundred times a day. While there isn’t an incredible amount of input to gain from having one’s phone in a foreign language, it does help to continually interact with it. To go a step further, a lot of websites that I visit are set to Italian, and newly visited sites load by default in Italian. When you’re running into the language in these small but incredibly frequent ways, it does wonders for maintaining the language.
As I mentioned earlier in the article, as my proficiency in Italian increased, how I began to use it also increased. I have always been a big fan of YouTube for language learning, and I still very much am! However, my Italian YouTube experience has undergone a shift over time from educational channels to regular YouTubers making content for Italians. Since I watch a considerable amount of YouTube, I cannot stress enough how significant of an impact watching videos in Italian has on my language skills. Listening to and watching native speakers use the language in everyday situations and contexts really helps to fortify the language in your brain and constantly exposes you to new vocabulary, expressions, and other ways in which the language is used!
I’ve been writing a lot about passive ways that I use Italian throughout my day, but what about the active ways in which I use Italian? It’s simple, yet extremely effective: friendships. After 4 trips to Italy, living with a host family, and actively seeking out Italians at home in New Jersey and New York, I’ve accumulated quite a lot of Italian friends! Fortunately for me, the overwhelming majority of these friendships are rooted in Italian. That is, we use Italian as our language for communicating. I have dozens of Italian friends and regularly communicate with several of them. While most communication is through written messages on WhatsApp, I have a few friends that I regularly do video chats with. With a wealth of Italian friends, using the language actively in my everyday life at home in the US is easy and extremely effective.
Beyond YouTube, language settings, and friendships, there are a plethora of other ways that I use and engage with the Italian language in my normal life. These include:
- Movies and TV Series
- these days my Netflix and Amazon Prime viewing habits consist almost exclusively of Italian shows and movies, a great way to have fun while using the language passively
- Reading
- reading is the best way to learn new vocabulary and keep your existing knowledge sharp
- Journaling
- I occasionally journal to write down my thoughts, I’ll do this in Italian
- Memes
- I follow a few Italian meme pages on Instagram and sub to a meme subreddit
- My YouTube Channel
- creating content for my YouTube channel allows me to speak Italian even if I have no one to speak it with, I also get to hear and improve my pronunciation and mistakes
