I'm among the top 3% Italian learners on Duolingo

In preparation for a two-week vacation in Italy in 2001, I began learning Italian in my mid-60s. I fell in love with the country and the language and have continued to study Italian since.

For a long time a group of five of us met with a tutor once a week, a woman who was a serious teacher who was patient and helpful. I've also spent two week-long language-learning sessions in Bologna. I am certainly not fluent as I am reminded every time we watch an Italian movie or mystery series. But in Italy I am able to make myself understood, ask directions (and understand the answer), reserve a hotel room, order a meal.

The Covid pandemic finally killed our Italian group, which had shrunk to three anyway. I wanted to continue studying if only for the intellectual stimulation and hope that one day I will be able to read if not easily at least falteringly. Somehow I stumbled across Duolingo.

According to Wikipedia the idea for Duolingo originated in 2009 by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his Swisborn post-grduate student Severin Hacker. "A driving motivation was von Ahn's upbringing in Guatemala, where he saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. Hacker . . . believed that 'free education will really change the world' and wanted to provide an accessible means for doing so."

Although Duolingo can be free, I subscribe for $90 a year and am not pestered by ads. The program gives learners a variety of exercises to reinforce what we've learned. These include vocabulary quizzes, translations from Italian to English and English to Italian using an assortment of words provided, repetitions of spoken Italian, writing dictated Italian, translating into Italian without aids, and more. 

I like the program because the principle is to teach the language the way a child learns: Introduce words and show how to use them without much grammar explanation, although some grammar is available. I like it because it keeps track of your daily performance and I am obsessive enough that now I've got a streak going I want to keep it going. And once a year, you can check your achievement.

Am I learning more Italian? Yes. Am I becoming more fluent? Probably not. Will I someday be able to read an Italian story? We'll see.

I take it back; this dog's a keeper

To say I was not looking forward to the choice for the mystery book club's monthly meeting would be an understatement. The story told entirely by a dog? Come on. I know mystery writers—and publishers—are desperate for something fresh, original. But a dog? So it was with some trepidation I began It's a Wonderful Woof by Spencer Quinn, the twelfth book in the "Chet & Bernie" series.

It just goes to show how mistaken one can be (me, in this case). Chet, the dog, is a delightful character and a better narrator than some people I know.

Spencer Quinn is the pen name of Peter Abrahams (and not to be confused with the South African author Peter Abrahams). Abrahams has been publishing fiction since 1980; the first Chet & Bernie mystery was published in 2008. Two have appeared since It's a Wonderful Woof (2021) and the fifteenth is due out in 2024.

He says that a book reviewer commented that dogs often appeared in his novels, and one night at dinner his wife said, "You should do something with dogs." He says, "I had dogs in other books I'd written but you never saw anything from their point of view. So I probably knew within 30 seconds the three pillars that hold the Chet and Bernie series up."

First, a dog narrator. Second, a traditional private eye story told by the detective's sidekick. Third, "the dog narrator would not be a talking dog. He would not be a human wrapped in a dog suit. He wouldn't know about Mozart. He would be as canine as I could make him." On the evidence of It's a Wonderful Woof, he's done a remarkable job.

Chet flunked out of K9 school on the last day; nonetheless he's a trained police dog. He knows that Bernie Little, who heads The Little Detective Agency, is the most wonderful human being on earth. He knows they live in an Arizona city but that's about it. His senses of smell and hearing are superior to human. He believes in marking what needs to be marked. He's afraid of snakes. He understands that "grabbing perps by the pant leg is how we close our cases." He cannot count beyond two, but he's always willing to learn sonething new. 

For example: Bernie is about to unlock a health club locker when he pauses. "'Anything iffy inside?' he said. Iffy was what again? 'Like a bomb for instance?' So iffy meant bombs? You learn so much in this business. A lovely breeze started up nearby, clearing the air of just about everything, even the poop smells. It didn't take me long to realize it was my tail, getting into the mix as it sometimes did. Bernie stuck the key in the lock and opened the door . . . ." Just a PI doing his job with his loyal partner.

While the mystery may not be the most imaginative, Chet's voice is striking enough to make It's a Wonderful Woof a superior mystery.

My latest published story

One of the highlights of 2023 was the publication of my short story "LST 742" in "Line of Advance Literary Journal."

To illustrate this post, I searched for pictures of LSTs and was surprised to find not just a generic LST photo, but this of the ship on which I traveled. I thought I'd invented the number. It makes you wonder about the line between fiction and reality.

How do you trust an unreliable narrator?

The Witch Tree by Tana French is a remarkable novel for a number of reasons. One is that she manages to tell the entire story, all 528 pages of it, in the first-person voice of Toby and maintain the reader's interest.

Toby, like other characters in the novel, is unreliable, and French is fascinated by unreliable narrators, “because I think that one of the core points of the arts is to give us a glimpse of what it’s like to be someone else, to see the world for a little while through someone else’s eyes, and to realize that other people have viewpoints that are completely different from our own, and that those are just as real and intense and vivid and valid."

Continuing to make her point in a New Yorker interview, she said. "And—this is going to sound odd—but I think an unreliable narrator does that best, because we are all unreliable writers of our own lives. We all reshape our own narratives to make them fit what we want to believe or what we need or just what interests us most. Like, if you’ve got siblings, and the two of you tell a story about some argument that happened in your childhood. You’re gonna get two completely different versions of that argument, because both of you have shaped the narrative to fit what suits your thoughts best. 

"If you’re reading an unreliable narrator, that’s what brings you closest to the person, because you’re not seeing their experience objectively. You’re seeing it the way they see it, which is through their thoughts, through their biases, through their needs and their fears and their desires. So I think an unreliable narrator is the one you know most intimately, ironically, and the one who comes closest to fulfilling what the arts are really for.”