IT was about the time my Italian teacher was explaining exceptions to the exceptions to the rule on article and adjective modifiers for possessive nouns that I uttered the only Italian phrase that came easily after studying the language for a week.
\o7"Come mai?"
\f7Roughly translated, that means, "But why?" I said it with a long, despairing, quasi-operatic moan that made my teacher stop, surprised.
"Susana, that would have been perfect if you'd done this at the same time," she said, cupping her hands, putting them together back to back, and then bouncing them up and down. I'd seen that all-purpose Italian gesture of emphasis in all three parts of "The Godfather."
I tried it with \o7come mai\f7 and felt so pleased with the result that I decided I stood at least a remote chance of someday being able to speak Italian.
Learning a foreign language is never easy, of course. It takes a significant time commitment, and it taxes the gray matter. But there is no better tool for travelers. Knowing how to speak a foreign language is a magic key to foreign cultures, a piece of travel gear far more useful than a backpack or guidebook.
I studied French in high school and college. For a long time, that was all I needed to blunder around France, though French people clearly became enervated whenever I opened my mouth. Oddly, it seemed, I spoke French with more fluency and fewer inhibitions in Francophone places apart from the mother country, such as Morocco and Quebec. On a few delightful occasions, I found I could use French as a lingua franca, as when I met an Italian couple in the Indian Ocean islands of Seychelles. They didn't speak English, and I didn't know Italian, so we communicated gleefully in a halting, ungrammatical pidgin French that would have appalled a native speaker.
When I moved to Paris almost two years ago, I spent a month studying French intensively, which has enhanced my experience abroad. Now I understand about half of what I hear, I read French newspapers and I can usually figure out how to say what I want, though I won't soon be asked to join the Academie Francaise, that great bastion of the French language.
Never mind. Learning just a few words in a foreign language before taking a trip opens doors for a traveler. So before a recent visit to Montenegro, I taught myself to say "hello," "goodbye," "please" and "thank you" in that country's seemingly impenetrable mother tongue, linguistically akin to Serbo-Croatian.
