LEARNING a foreign language can do far more than impress the locals. It can shock and amuse them and cause you more embarrassment than you bargained for.

I must apologise. It appears I have misjudged the readership’s sense of humour.

After last week’s column about my mother-in-law I have been swamped by letters of complaint. "How dare I be so insensitive and disrespectful?", "Who the hell do I think I am holding others to ridicule?", "How would I like it if I were on the receiving end of invective masquerading as humour?".

I won’t quote from all the clenched-fist correspondence, suffice to say the mailbag was weighty and the poor postie who lugged it to my desk is currently recuperating from a hernia. But I did read every one of your letters and I want you to know they hit their target – I am remorseful and on bended knee.

Which is why, on behalf of myself, I would hereby like to apologise to all the crocodiles out there who took offence to last week’s Write Stuff. It was unfeeling and downright wrong of me to compare you with my mother-in-law.

And with that unsavoury matter behind us, let’s move on to this week’s topic.

In addition to your letters, I read a report during the week which suggested the thing most mortals would like to achieve before dying is learning to speak a second language. Apart from swimming with dolphins, of course.

These days you can get a superficial knowledge of Arabic, Latin or Japanese simply by reading the average footballer’s tattooed forearms or browsing the back of a teenager’s neck. I saw a young woman on Trinity Beach the other day who had so many lines of French etched into her back that I had to put a bookmark between L4 and L5 so I could read the rest next time. I reckon her back could become a bestseller.

But the report suggested most people desire a deeper appreciation of foreign languages than just a couple of inky clichés or carpe diem behind the ear. With globalisation rapidly blurring international boundaries and cultures, this is most heartening.

As a speaker of English and Italian, however, I feel it necessary to warn the monolingual among you that it is easier to find a stray dolphin to paddle about with than to truly learn a foreign tongue. And I don’t mean a "working knowledge" or enough to "get by". I mean thinking, sleeping, breathing and dreaming in a foreign tongue.

It takes years of embarrassing mistakes. Well, it did in my case. By all means learn a language before you die, but be prepared for others to die laughing.

When I moved to Italy I not only fell in love with a local, I also fell in love with the local lingo. I simply couldn’t get enough of the beautiful banter and began speaking it so much I almost got stretch marks on my tongue.

Italian is widely considered the most melodic of the Romance
languages. King Charles V of Spain said:

If you want to upset an Italian ear, subject it to the angular tone of the Germans or the sterile talk of the Swiss.

To an Italian, rhythm and melody are far more important than efficiency and precision, and perhaps even meaning. Italians enjoy speaking their language and view it as a pastime rather than a means to an end.

In their eyes, or mouths rather, it’s an instrument with which to make music, a brush with which to paint. Why do you think Italians talk so much? And why are so many operas in Italian?

Italian sentences are like symphonies. Energised and harmonised by vowels and double consonants, even mundane words massage the mouth of the speaker and tickle the ear of the listener.

Saying the word stuzzicadenti (toothpick), for example, will do more for your mouth than actually using one. Likewise "tastebuds" sounds somewhat bland in English, while "pupille gustative" goes close to satisfying them.

But such beauty was still beyond me when, after a couple of months in the country, I walked up to a man surrounded by boats on a Sicilian beach and asked if I could hire a paedophile (pedofilo) for an hour rather than a pedal boat (pedalo). I didn’t even know the word for paedophile before uttering it by accident.

This was the first of many gaffes, including asking a real estate agent if an apartment I was interested in renting had a roof (tetto) rather than a bed (letto). But my greatest linguistic lapse was asking a butcher in Milan for a kilometre of sausages rather than a kilogram.

"La Madonna!" he exclaimed. "You must be hungry."

Italy is a good place to be hungry.

By the time I’d digested all those sausages I had also digested the language, though even now I still choke on the odd bit of gristle.

And I never hire pedal boats in Sicily.

Becoming bilingual is an embarrassing process of trial and error. The biggest obstacle is pride. So whichever language you put on your "to do before you die" list, my tip is to learn the word for window and toss pride out of it.

Either that or grab the nearest dolphin.

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