After nearly two weeks roaming Rome and flitting about Florence, I am still pre-programmed to think through my request before entering a store (and translating that request to Italian, foreseeing the attendant's response, and formulating contingency replies). A memory more prominent coming from this trip than when I was abroad: I found the English-speaking Italian population to be very sparse!
Maybe we were simply very successful at eating in less touristic areas, or maybe we were just very fortunate to intermix with an authentic population. Whatever the case, my travel companion, Mary, and I found ourselves speaking more conversational Italian than the typical "vorrei.... qualcosa di mangiare" fare.
I am confident my subject-verb agreements were patchy at best, and I know my conjugations/tenses beyond passato prossimo and present were a tangle of extra vowels, but I always tried my best when we met an Italian whose English skills fell short of ours in Italian. The point of my entry is to ponder what, in the English language, might procure the most hang-ups and mistakes for a word-stumbling Italian. I'm sure I sounded like I was speaking with a mouthful of marbles and I want to KNOW what it's like to hear that kind of incapacitated mumbling!
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