33. Scuola d’Italiano [Scudit ] in Rome

It was Alexander Pope who said, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” and with hindsight, I can tell you that I was a big fool. As I mentioned in my last blog, I read Scuola d’Italiano’s [Scudit’s] brochure, I liked what I read about emphasising conversation, and so I signed up without further ado. What spurred me to go to Scudit was the following sentence in its English-written brochure:

Great stress is therefore laid on the spoken language . . ..We concentrate mainly on getting the students to speak ….

Well, I thought, Scudit is the school I have been looking for, because after taking courses in Siena, Perugia, Verona, Vancouver, and at home, I really did not need more of the same. Not that I knew my grammar, but what I didn’t remember I could easily review. What I needed (and need) was conversation and more conversation until I could with ease use the right tenses and find the right word at the right time. I believed, and still believe, that only practice would give me this ease. And here was a school that promised emphasis on conversation.

My mistake (not the school’s) was to think that Scudit was comparing itself to other Italian language schools in Italy. For example, at both Leonardo da Vinci (Siena) and Linguait (Verona) we studied grammar and we conversed. So obviously, I thought, Scudit was offering something very different – a course where (I thought) conversation was stressed and grammar derived from the conversation as the need arose. How else could it offer a different approach? Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Scudit was really comparing its method to the “traditional” old-fashioned approach which, for lack of a better word, I call “academic”. I think this is still quite common for most of us who study Italian in our home country. For example, my first three Italian courses at night school were of this nature – essentially grammar and written exercises. Size of the class is often also a limiting factor. Given this comparison, I would say that certainly Scudit does stress the spoken language.

However, when compared to the other private language schools I attended in Italy, I would say these schools gave more opportunity to converse than Scudit. Like Scudit, both Leonardo and Linguait had a mixture of conversation and grammar. As at Scudit, initial conversation occurred when the instructor asked each of us to recount what we did the previous day. Then the grammar or language lesson began. But unlike Scudit, both Leonardo and Linguait gave over the second half of the morning to conversation. Even the University for Foreigners at Perugia, with its large class, had special hours for conversation.

In short, Scudit does not focus on conversation beyond that practised at the two private schools I had attended in Italy. Indeed, even less so. In fairness, it does not claim to offer anything different from other Italian language schools. Moreover, what it does do it does well enough, and its teachers are lively. But why choose Scudit over another school? Frankly, if I knew then what I know now about the school, I would not have chosen it even though it does a good job teaching. Many reasons come into choosing a school – at least for me, and I will discuss them in subsequent blogs.