"Chi troppo vuole, nulla stringe"

Buonasera !

Finally, it seems that this blog is becoming a real blog, i.e. updated more or less every day ! Today, a lot of philosophical thoughts about life, Italian spirituality and architecture.

No, actually I think I'll just put some pictures and add a few comments... Anyway, enjoy !

Language mixing theory
It's the first time in my short life that I've had the occasion to (try to) speak four different languages during only one day :

• French (motherlanguage),
• English (learnt at school, spoken and improved a lot in BEST),
• Italian (learnt last year and spoken here),
• Dutch (learnt at school and unfortunately almost never practised in the real life).
  

As you can guess, Italian is the language of... Italy ! So, all my lectures are in Italian (that's quite hard when the teacher speak normally - i.e. fast for me), and it's the main language I speak with my flatmate, Nicola (student of Polito too) and when you ask some infos in the street (like "Vorrei andare a...", "Dov'è ...", "Quant'è ?", "Grazie", "Ciao", "Sono uno stupido studente Erasmus, e non parlo bene italiano", etc.)

I speak French mainly with the French and Belgian Erasmus students here, but also sometimes with a few Italian people learning or speaking French.

English is naturally the most used language with the Erasmus, and also sometimes with my academic advisor.

Sometimes, I try to speak also Dutch (or Flemish, it's the same) with some Belgian Erasmus. I said "try to speak", not "speak fluently". Indeed, it's a pitty (or maybe a shame), but I'm not able to really speak the motherlanguage of the half of the population of Belgium !
Anyway, after a lot of courses at school but a lack of practice, I still remember the basics and I'm able to express myself ;-) However, sometimes I need a lot of concentration to find some words. So, this kind of conversation looks like :
"Hello. Last day, I ... went to Piazza Something, because... ... (you can notice the double "...", i.e. a long while, due to the difficult sentence construction in dutch after because-omdat) I wanted to visit that thing"


Moreover, as I said before, some days I switch from French to Dutch, then from Dutch to Italian, and finally to English. I can ensure you that it's very hard, and it happens (especially in the morning when I'm still sleepy) that I use some English words in a Dutch sentence.

After a long thinking time (ten minutes), I discovered a new theory about languages. Here you are this wonderful theory...
Normal people can learn without too many difficulties two, three or four languages. Unfortunately, as in a computer hard drive, the available space easily and quickly accessible is limited. I drew a little diagram illustrating this idea.
However, when they have to use all those languages in a short while, their brain becomes totally messy. They start to mix several languages, and have some problem to stay understandable. So, to avoid this problem, their brain throw out one of those languages, in order to let more easily-and-quickly-accessible space for one or two languages.
That's my theory. I don't know what do you think about that? Is it some brain-specialist reading this insignificant blog ? If yes, could (s)he give me some comments ?



Torino's night life

Piazza Vittorio Veneto

Piazza Vittorio Veneto (2)

Bridge over the Po. At the end of the bridge, there's a church (Gran Madre di Dio) built to save de bridge from Napoleon

Me, Pierre (France), Katrina (Austria), Vincent (Belgium), Erik (Norway), Mathias (Sweden), Steven (Belgium)

Another group picture, with also Elsi (Finland) and Pierre (France)

Helene (Sweden), me, Delphine (France), Gerlinde (Belgium), Mathias

Church nearby Piazza della Repubblica

Nearby Piazza della Repubblica...