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Where you are, and where the next year goes
A hundred and four lessons in, it is worth being exact about what you have and what you don't. They have covered the ground a solid B2 stands on: all four congiuntivo tenses with the sequence rule, the four past systems with the remoto for recognition, the three hypotheticals, the passive in both its forms, the impersonal si, the clitic combinations, the relatives including il quale and cui, and eight distinguishable registers from dialect to officialese. What that gets you is the ability to live in Italian rather than to visit it — to argue, to write a letter that lands, to read a newspaper without a dictionary and to hear which Italy someone is speaking from. What it does not yet get you is a C1, which is mostly a matter of range and of reading quantity, and of the two things Alex names: the passato remoto heard aloud, and officialese, both still arriving half a line late. Francesca's answer to the last question is the one to keep. Studying and maintaining are different activities: something difficult read every week, something written for a real reader, and conversation with people who do not slow down for you. Note the thing Alex says that is the actual measure of all this, and it is not on any syllabus: he no longer notices. Quando non te ne accorgi più, ci sei arrivato. The third year takes Francesca's advice literally. Alex is about to be asked to read something difficult — a whole novel, set in Trieste across sixty years and written partly in its dialect — closely enough to put it into English, his own language, for real readers. A translator cannot skim: every tense, every joke and every shift of register in the original has to be understood before it can be carried across, and has to be explained to the author, the editor and the reader. That is where C1 lives, and it is where the next fifty-two lessons go. In bocca al lupo.