BETWEEN ‘ippopo-TAAAAAAAA-mo’ AND ‘ippo-POOOOOOOOO-tamo

I’m (starting to be) frustrated with my Italian, period.
I thought being here would boost my language skill instantly. In fact, I knew more Italians in Jakarta than in the whole Perugia, which, as far as I have seen, is packed with foreigners. Foreigners are everywhere, in my house, in my school, out in the streets…..
Not that I have anything against the foreigners here, really (I’m one of them too)… I love making new friends. In fact, I always make serious efforts to get to know my classmates better. It is so fun to observe each of them; how the native English speakers have difficulties in rolling their ‘r’, how the Chinese students get confused distinguishing ‘l’ and ‘r’ (which is fatal, cos both sounds are used widely in Italian and contrast to each other), or how the Russian and Portuguese speakers often pronounce ‘d’ as ‘dz’. The Europeans usually speak more fluently, in a faster pace than the Asian ones, who prefer the slower professor and are too fond of writing everything (that my prof often seizes their pens in order to get their attention). One of the most outstanding Chinese students is named Lin (the girl who said that she liked me instantly, remember?)---I suspect she studies for hours everyday, reading lots of books and memorizing new words every night. She is so studious and brilliant, and yet she demands me to teach her two new words everyday, thinking that I (who don’t feel studious or brilliant at all lately) know more than she does. I often have to rack my brain, cos almost every time I come out with a relatively difficult word, she already knows it. And yet, I am perplexed to find her sometimes struggling with the words that I consider simple and easy, like entusiasta, atmosfera, and other words which you can guess easily.
“How come you know all of them?” she asked me one day. “Well,” I said, a bit confused. “Cos they are similar to English, and also to Indonesian.”
And then she explained to me that between Italian and Chinese, there are no similar words, not even one. And so it opened my eyes that it must be hard for her and other Chinese students to study Italian, not mentioning the struggles in pronunciation.
Indonesians, I think, are a lot luckier. We can roll our ‘r’ easily and most of the sounds in Italian are the same with those in our own language. My biggest problem is the accent. I don’t know (yet) how to ‘press’ in the right ‘place’….and I still have to learn a lot to singsong my pronunciation… (for instance, taking from my friend Daniel’s example, not to merely say ‘nutella’, but to singsong it into ‘nu- TEEEEEEEEEEE-lla).
And now I have just found out that pressing the wrong syllable could draw incessant laughter from the Italians. In Jakarta, I was reprimanded once for saying ‘FEEE-lice’, rather than ‘fe-LIIIII-ce’. Now luckily I have a help from an Italian who is willing to yell at me every time I ‘hit’ the wrong syllable. But the problem is, my memory is too short to memorize the right ones. At first I made a hypothesis that most of the accent falls on the penultimate syllable, but then I found out that in some other words, the accent could fall in the first, or second syllable. There is no fixed rule really… all I have to do is to get my ears used to it and to imitate how the Italians speak. Now, in the class, I’m always busy marking the accent below the words as the professor speaks. And I have a plan to record the voice of a native Italian saying a list of Italian words to analyze the ‘rule’ (if there’s any). And of course, among the list there will be the beloved word IPPOPOTAMO (hippopotamus)--- and when I have gathered enough proofs, surely I’ll try to formulate the rules to it (I’m sure they exist!!!!!!!!)