
How Italy Improved My English - pepys
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/05/10/expat-writing-how-italy-improved-my-english/
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kfk
I am Italian, I live abroad and mostly speak English since ~8 years. The
"issue" I face is that the dialect version of my Italian feels easier and
easier, but I believe I still kept a good written version of the language. Few
years back I spent 1 year in Spain - I had serious issues communicating in
Italian during that time. I think as long as your foreign language is very
different, you are good, if it's similar, not so much.

Edit. Ok, to tell the truth, I don't feel very compelled to maintain a good
spoken Italian. On the other hand, I do want to keep my written version as
sharp as possible.

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paride5745
Same for me.

I'm Italian, lived in UK for a few years, and I have problems with Standard
Italian, so much that often I use English grammar in Italian or I have to
Google translate from English to Italian for words.

Also, I noticed as well that my home dialect is getting stronger than Standard
Italian, although I lived in another part of Italy for almost 10 years.

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walterstucco
I'm Italian as well and I understand forgetting a few words, but losing the
ability to speak Italian properly in just a few years sounds too much...

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lukeholder
Is it me, or does this writer, use far, far too many, commas?

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toyg
It might be. Italians use commas with the frequency English-speakers use
periods (dots). You might be making his point, really.

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QuercusMax
Fascinating. Reminds of reading Caesar, who used so many commas and had
sentences which were fairly difficult to unpack. (At least that's how it
seemed when I was in high school.) Wonder if that's a cultural thing which has
been inherited through all these years.

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toyg
Most educated Italians are still forced to study Latin as teenagers (although
numbers have shrunk in the last decade or so). And of course, Romans invented
lawyers...

Seriously, once you look for it, you see it very clearly. You can usually spot
Italians writing in English for their overuse of "the", their sentence length,
and a higher frequency of passive verbs. If it feels like that but the number
of "the"s is correct, the only explanation is that you are reading Ian McEwan.

