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Old January 07, 2014, 05:48 PM
lottatrvlr lottatrvlr is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2014
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Thanks for the reinforcement, my husband who's monolingual insists that I learn Italian. After 30+ years of marriage, I tend to do what I think is best and will concentrate on my Spanish.

I'll be traveling with a long-time friend who speaks Italian and has eight cousins whom we'll visit while in Rome. I'm confident us two women, and perhaps the cousin (s), will be just fine. I just truly enjoy conversing in the native language and will to continue to use the Italian While Driving CDs to get the accent down. Fortunately for me I don't drive much, instead I sew and listen to Spanish lessons and revitalize my Spanish brain paths. This time around I'm concentrating on learning new verbs tenses, more daily conversation needs, etc.

When we drove across the Yucatan I saw numerous places with names with at least 5-8 syllables, which are far more than English city names IMHO--Valladodid, Oxkutzcab, Dzibilchaltun. After a bit of practice I was able to pronounce them fairly correctly, but it took some practice to just keep saying those letters

While driving I was practicing my Italian and think my accent's good. I had read about the emphasis on the third syllable and that really helped. Plus we use so many Italians words, but with an American accent. Have you seen the Chef Boyardee's spaghetti O's commercial? It's a perfect example of difference between Italian and American enunciation.
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