Tensing up lest verb tenses take over

JUNE CASAGRANDE

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Grammar snobbery doesn’t

pay. Humility, humility, humility. Got it? Good, now will you help me

remember, because once again I’m paying the price for failing to heed

my own mantra.

Those of you keeping score at home of my various and many public

grammar humiliations will want to have a pen and paper handy. Last

week, I copped a bit of an attitude about the grammar-phobic or

grammar-hostile state of adult foreign language instruction. Well,

actually, I copped a major attitude. I was peeved because the

textbook for my new Italian class dodges grammar almost completely

and, in an effort to seem fun and user-friendly, it teaches only in

the present tense.

I concluded last week’s column with a snobbish proclamation that I

would seek out my own Italian grammar education to supplement all the

buon giorno business I was sure to get in class. Just because

educators were peddling easy answers to the grammar-timid didn’t mean

I couldn’t get some solid instruction.

So I typed “Italian verb conjugations” into a search engine, and

here’s what I found: presente, imperfetto, passato remoto, futuro,

passato prossimo, trapassato, trapassato prossimo, futuro anteriore,

condizionale, imperativo.

Human beings must have some primal fear-suppressing ability that

allows them to delay terror in dangerous situations such as when

confronted with a lion, a bear and a rattlesnake, all of them

brandishing shiny new assault weapons. Or perhaps I just wasn’t smart

enough to know at that point that I should be scared.

I looked at the names of the conjugations, gritted my teeth and

thought: “I can figure this out. How much different can it be from

the stuff I learned in French class?” The presente tense, I figured,

was just like English. “I dance.” Passato remoto, the first past

tense listed, therefore must be the simple past tense: “I danced.”

Thus, this passato prossimo business must be the equivalent of the

English “I was dancing.”

Wrong. After the first class Thursday night, I asked the teacher

about these two forms of past tense. Now, at long last, I am afraid.

The remoto, she explained, is some kind of

literary/academic/obscure tense -- one that would come up if you were

studying Shakespeare. The prossimo one, if I understood the teacher

correctly, is the one I should learn first -- the most basic and

simple past tense. That’s baffling to me, because unlike the remoto’s

one-word conjugations -- fui, which I figured was the same form as

“danced” or “was” -- this prossimo stuff all uses two words, such as

sono stato, which to me sounds more like “have danced” or “have

been.”

Suddenly, it’s beginning to make sense why adults who were scared

to death of this stuff in high school don’t want to wade back into

the subject. At the same time, however, it’s becoming more clear that

fear is the biggest thing to fear.

We all know many of these verb tenses already. But, unlike when

we’re learning a foreign language, we don’t use terms like future

perfect and conditional. That’s because we already know how to say,

“I will have traveled to Europe twice before my 40th birthday,” or,

“I have been to Paris only once before.” Those are the future perfect

and conditional, respectively, but you didn’t need to know that to

use them correctly.

The lesson, for me, is to face the fear, but to remember that, in

order to face the fear, I must first admit that even grammar snobs

get scared sometimes.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

JuneTCN@aol.com.