Welcome to the Rachel's English podcast. I'm Rachel, and I put together this podcast for people who are studying English as a second language.

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Today, my husband, David, and I are going to be discussing a recent trip that we took to Italy.

We were there for a month and we just got back about a week ago.

And we're going to discuss what it was like for us to be non-native speakers.

And not only non-native speakers, but non-native speakers with very little Italian skill.

We're going to talk about what that was like from the language perspective and then also just from our personal experience,

our personalities, how did it feel to be in another country, speaking another language?

David, to start, I'd like to ask you, what did you do to prep as far as language before we left?

Well, not very much. And it's definitely a regret. You were doing a lot

of practicing with your audio course. And so there were some times when we were sitting together

in the living room and I was doing something else and you were practicing. So I sort of, I think

I absorbed a little bit of the set of sounds and a couple

bits of vocabulary, but I really didn't do very much on my own. And it's a regret. I, I really

wish I had done a little bit more. Do we need to study Italian now and go back again in a few months?

Yes. Okay. We'll do that. For me, I had actually taken an adult night learning class

in Italian like 10 years ago when I was in graduate school. And, you know, that was,

I remember our Italian teacher, he was, he was fun, but it was, you know, no one was

taking it super seriously. It was mostly people who were just taking it for fun.

Mm-hmm.

And then I did, maybe two months before we left, I did start listening to an audio course

...