Someone recently told me they spoke no Italian, but
their son had married a woman with an Italian background and although she
wasn't a practising Catholic or living in Italy, she wanted an Italian
marriage. She described the hoops to go through to get an English bishop
involved. Apparently, the C of E bishop of Gibraltar is also the bishop
of a lot of Europe including Italy. How weird!
DH and I learned Italian when similarly, his eldest daughter
was marrying an Italian. although they married in an English register office,
we still learned Italian so we could talk with his parents and sister. I
thought it would be wonderful because their children would be bilingual, but
sadly, 25 years later, they're not. Although their father was a house husband,
he spoke to them in English, initially quite broken English because he came to
England without any English and he and she spoke in French!
When we were courting, husband and I used to meet in a Italian evening class - local for him and I drove a long way for this! After a few years, we
moved from that slightly informal conversation class, when DH enrolled us both
on Italian As level. which I did not want to do. No more exams please. He
worked v hard. I went and got a book of Italian songs, learned them by heart so
I could speak Italian well. I did better than my quieter husband on the
oral. when it came to writing exam answers, I tweaked my writing from whatever
I'd learned in the songs, knowing I'd then got the right grammar, and I just
needed to know the vocabulary. I got a better grade than I'd got in my A levels
when I was 18.
