I still have a terrible pronunciation, and I can’t say I feel at home with English, but surely I am comfortable. The trick, obviously, is practice. Over the years I’ve grown so accustomed to reading and writing tech stuff in English that, when I read or write it in Italian, it feels just weird and funny. Sadly this extends to my entertainment reading (sci-fi mostly). Even using software in Italian doesn’t feel right.
This morning I found a newsletter from Amazon in my inbox. They were giving away a techno-thriller Kindle ebook at €0,99. Normally I’d just hit “Buy now with One Click”, but not this time, as I discovered the book was in Italian – not translated, it was written in Italian.
A techno-thriller written in Italian. Can you imagine that?
I still prefer Italian for pretty much any other kind of reading, but my preference for English is slowly crawling in other contexts. This makes me both happy and sad. Happy because it means I grow more and more fluent with English, which is vital for my job. Sad because Italian is a beautifully superior language (no offense, but it is), and is a pleasure to read, write and speak.
I can’t fool anyone, however, because Italian is a minority language. Moreover, despite we Italians are highly English-resistant, in an impetus meant to attract foreign students and professors, several universities are now offering English-only classes (Google Translate). I wish we had English classes back when I attended university…
Hard times to be bound to local languages, and hard times for local languages.