Capisci?

Tu parli e capisci Italiano? (Do you speak and understand Italian?)



Not yet, but I'm working on it.



I am using a program called Mango to learn Italian. I saw a little flyer for it at the library. Weird, because I was thinking about my options in my previous post. You have to pay to use Mango on line, but since my library subscribes to it, I can do it for free! I made Joe promise that we would do this 2 times per week, Tuesdays and Saturdays. We did it together this past Tuesday, and it went real well. I am way ahead, though. I've been doing a lesson every day at work at lunch time, and I am now on lesson 4. It is HARD! Sometimes I just want to put my head down on the desk and groan. I took German in High School, and the similarities to English are notable. Not so much with Italian. And, like so many languages, Italian has formal and casual ways of saying the same thing, plus different ways to say things depending if the subject is male of female. It was the same with German. All of this is good exercise for my brain. My goal is to see how much Italian I can learn in a year. At some point I will want to seek out some people who speak Italian and try talking to them, but I need some time to get past, "Hi, how are you?"

Apart from learning Italian, I am trying to have a nice summer. We went to the Jersey Shore Sunday, Seaside Heights to be exact. We like the crazy boardwalk. The people watching is primo, and I just don't feel right if a summer goes by and I haven't had a sausage and pepper sandwich and Kohr's Ice cream. It's a Jersey thing. There was a good band playing on the beach called Swamp Donkey. One of the people in the band was wearing purple shiney hi-top sneakers, yellow socks, purple shorts and yellow t-shirt. Just based on that, I loved him.

We will also go to Cape May in August, thanks to generous friends who rent a house there for 3 weeks and invite us for one of the weekends. Cape May is a whole different deal than Seaside. I think the people who visit Cape May are a little different, because it is more expensive and a little calmer. If you want to party, you should drive a little ways north to Wildwood. If you want to party you most likely don't really care about Victorian Architecture, anyway, which is half the point of Cape May.

Kate's 26th birthday was yesterday, happy birthday, Kate!