Over the weekend it was decided that this year’s wedding anniversary would be celebrated somewhere in Italy.

It has been a long time since I last had any extended exposure to Romance languages. My French and Spanish are still fairly strong, though I rarely have the chance to speak either at any great length these days. I’ve flirted with the idea of learning Italian many times over the years, though I have always ended up deciding not to. This is largely because I felt any professional edge it might offer me would be outweighed by the effort required.

I have since changed my approach to learning languages significantly; whereas previously my language selection process heavily factored in potential professional utility, I now study languages almost exclusively out of personal interest and with little regard for their potential professional application.

Between now and May I will be studying Italian between ten and twenty minutes a day. I am very excited to see how rapidly I can reach a conversational level where I am able to improvise when discussing topics with which I have a strong familiarity. In particular, I am interested in comparing my previous experiences learning French and Spanish, at a time when my approach to language learning was admittedly quite haphazard, to the experience of learning Italian equipped with an approach informed by over a decade of refinement.