ABSTRACT
With a sudden surge of determination, I recently purchased instruction books, short stories and a dictionary in Italian, a language that I grew up with but never mastered. After a period of studying on my own, it became clear that to improve my fluency I would need to actually converse with others, so I spent some time investigating all of the different Italian classes on offer here in the cosmopolitan city of Sydney. I never did sign up; I lost my nerve. Despite a love of all things language-related, a career in language teaching and research, and a visceral longing for the sounds and feel of my childhood language, the thought of taking a language class as a student fills me with dread.
