As I said, I didn’t showcase my italian skills on the first day and got put in the beginner class. I can’t decide if that was a good thing or not.

The school is full immersion and after the first day we are not supposed to speak any English. If I had been in level two I think that would have really thrown me. I was not ready to hear nothing but italian. However, level one is basically a repeat of things and words I already know. The main problem is that there are only two of us in the class and she is a complete beginner from Japan. She speaks a little English but not much. Her main problem is that she won’t even try. We do a lot of work matching words to pictures and she just sits there. It makes class awkward on occasion.

There has not been a lot of structure to the class. We jump around from nouns to verbs and only learn the singular terms for everything. We listen to a lot of lessons trying to pick out individual words and hopefully that will improve my conversation. That is if everyone would talk as slowly as they do on the lessons.

The Freestyle class at home has more structure and I think that might work better for me. However, I can see where this method works if you have the time to go straight through. My Japanese classmate is here for 8 weeks.

I got to try my skills in Perugia. I could never quite catch “can I help you” but I did okay after that. At least I could understand prices so i have improved a little. I also didn’t do to bad in the museums. There were some english interpretations but not many and I was able to make my way through it.

As usual I spoke to soon. You should be careful what you wish for or my case complain about because sometimes you get it. My brilliance finally showed through and they decided to advance me out of the beginners class. They said it was just not enough of a challenge for me. However, I wasn’t ready to join the next level of students (so much for my brilliance) and now I am in a class of one. I have one on one instruction for 2 hours where we work on conversation and then 2 hours of activities where someone pops in occasionally and goes over my finished assignments.

Today I had to talk about my typical day using the few verbs I know. So I could basically tell her when I got up, showered, got dressed, when and what I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, how long I worked, watched tv, read and finally when I went to bed. She was surprised by how early we get up and go to work but even more so by the fact we eat breakfast at the office and that it is a taco. She’s said she went to work early (9:00 am) ate lunch around 1:30 and never had dinner before 8. She is very nice so hopefully this week will be fun.