Learning Italian...Fast!

Finally, Antonia is starting to attend school consistently - fingers crossed and all that!

The upshot of this is that her Italian is coming on leaps and bounds. To say she is streets ahead of me would be an understatement! Luckily, so far, I can still understand what she is saying, as, yes, she does switch from one language to the other and doesn't seem to be aware that she is doing it. Her accent also sounds spot on to me. People in shops talk to her in Italian and aren't initially aware she is English. In the TIM shop today, where they must get 100's of tourists and students who speak English and badly accented Italian (myself included!) they chatted away to her in Italian. It was only when I opened my mouth that they looked surprised! In fact the first question wasn't "Oh, you are English" but "Oh, do you speak English" in Italian, to Antonia!! It also throws people because she just happens to have an Italian name, which is pure coincidence as she was born 2 years before we thought of moving here.

The joke is always, and I do mean "always", that she is going to be "insegnante della mama". Unfortunately it probably isn't such a joke!