Learning Italian From A Brochure

Problem
You look at a brochure or map or guidebook and it's all in a foreign language. You put it down again thinking, "I can't read that!"

Answer
Often you can. If it's a small map with only twenty or fewer words, half of them are likely to be place names you soon recognize.

Story
Two friends of mine went to Israel. One was a doctor doing work experience in a clinic. Another was on holiday, first working on a kibbutz, then staying on in a flat. I went to visit my friend in the flat. When I reached her apartment block, to my horror I had forgotten or lost the piece of paper with the number of her flat. I looked at the bells and names alongside - in Hebrew - not one in English! I saw there were at least twenty flats. I could not read Hebrew. I knew about one third of the Hebrew alphabet letters. I looked down the list of names. Hopeless.

I had no choice. It was either try to read or go home, disappointing both my friend and myself. If I could not read the name, my only other choice was to ring every bell until an English voice answered, or ask somebody who spoke English if they knew an English girl.

I started reading. Hopeless. The first four names were long and complicated. I could not read them and they looked nothing like my friend's name. Her first name began with a D. Her surname started with a c/k sound. The fifth name started with a D.

How many names started with a D? About five of them. This one started with a D. The second name started with a C or K. Plough on.

The names had no vowels, or none I could recognise. Just the dots or lines. So all I had was the consonants. But that made it easier. I only had to look for the consonants in the word.

The first name looked likely, the right number of consonants. The second name looked likely, the right number of consonants for the number of syllables in her surname.

I pressed the bell. My friend's voice answered. "Hello, come on up!" she said. ""Third floor. Number ...."

I spent half an hour torn between wanting to tell her and not wanting to tell her about my difficulty. I did not want to admit that I had lost her address. (I knew the location and block of flats, not the exact flat number). But I was very proud that I had deciphered the letters.

When I finally told her, she just shrugged. "If you'd pressed any button, people would know me. There are only two English girls here. If they sent you to the other one, she would have sent you to me."

The moral is: if you have to translate something, you probably can. As the American car manufacturer Ford famously said, "If you think you can do something you can. If you think you can't do something you can't."

Tips
Look for the words you know first. Learn the way locals pronounce and write famous place names. For example, in Italy, Florence is Firenze. In any item you are translating, you can usually recognize some of the names of people and places.

Look at signposts and learn the name of the capital or the city where you are staying. If you are lost and looking for a bus or train or station name, at least you can get back to the city. I have found this useful worldwide.

For example, driving from Athens to the second city of Thessaloniki, I kept seeing the same sign. I wrote it down, first the first letter, next time I saw it the second letter. Now I would do the same thing but just copying with a picture on my phone. You can ask the driver when you stop or the guide over lunch. I found the name I saw on all the signs was Athens. I then recognised one letter, the oval with a line across it - theta!

Yes, Greek is nearly 'all Greek to me'. Chinese is even harder. But driving around Hong Kong towards the border with China, I kept seeing a sign which looked like a square or oblong with a line through it. I asked a taxi driver, then a friend who spoke Mandarin, to confirm. The sign was for China, and the symbol meant Central. Central did not mean the centre of the city but was the name for the country. As far as the Chinese residents were concerned in the old days, China to them was the centre of the universe.

Then look at the words adjacent to the place names. What are they likely to be saying?

From this map, at first a mystery, once I had got over my reluctance to start, I soon translated every word:

Italian - English
di - of
Firenze - Florence
valle - valley
via - road

English - Italian
Florence - Firenze
of - di
road - via
valley - valle

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and teacher of English and foreign languages.
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