When I teach Italian to university students, I use sports as a metaphor for language learning. I explain that if you decide to run a marathon (or achieve any other sports related goal of your choice) and you start as a beginner – which for me is level couch potato – you can just expect to be able to do so one day without practicing! The first day you run 5 minutes, then 10 and eventually you are good enough to run a whole marathon; same goes for learning Italian: if you practice everyday, you’ll go from saying a few words to a whole sentence, to a full conversation. I use sports because most of my students are 17 or 18 and most of them are into sports, one way or another.
When I teach to adults, though, this metaphor doesn’t work that well anymore. Not that adults aren’t into sports, but it just doesn’t seem to resonate with them that much. So I switched to cooking and specifically to lasagna (I had to pick an Italian dish!!). If you’ve never made lasagna before in your life and someone tries to teach how to make it from scratch, you can’t expect your first lasagna to be perfect! You will learn how to make the pasta, then how to prepare bechamel sauce (yes, that’s what you put in traditional lasagna, not mozzarella), how to make bolognese sauce, and eventually your put it all together for the perfect dish. But you need to learn how to make each component and practice how to make it well before you are successful! Once you perfected the single components and your final product, then you can start experimenting with alternatives (a different sauce to make it vegetarian, pasta with spinach, etc..). Likewise, at the beginning of a language you are presented with a lot of new concepts and it is important to take the time to understand them separately before putting them together. Once you practiced for a while, you can start using those concepts in a more creative way and become a proficient user of a new language.
Good luck with your lasagna!
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