One of the cool things about Siena, other than the weather this time of year, is the fact that there are few tourists now, many Italians, and three other students at Dina and Vito’s house. At school, there are few novice Italian language students enrolled, at least the beginning students have been learning for a while now, most of whom began their studies at the start of the traditional semester. As a result, there is only one other student in my Italian language class – which is way cool. Monday I was the only student for the first two hours before the other pupil joined the class. As part of our learning during class today, we played a game where we read a brief sentence to the other leaving a blank spot in our recitation so the other could fill in the place with the appropriate preposition and article . . . seriously this was fun! For each correct answer we advanced our game token one space, if we missed two answers in a row, we were sent to preposizioni inferno – that’s Italian for “preposition hell”. The game certainly spiced up the frustrating and vexing aspect of learning Italian preposizioni and trust me on this, mystifying and puzzling just scratches the surface of the Italian preposizioni practices.
