Italian is a beautiful language. Such passion. The verve! Bellisimo! Alas, although my parents emigrated from Italy, they didn't teach me how to speak Italian as a child. "We were Americans now and should speak English!" After all, my name isn't Domenico - it's Dominick! Or maybe they just didn't want us to understand what they were arguing about all the time. And although they spoke Italian, their respective dialects - Calabrian and Sicilian - were their first languages.
Now I spend a few minutes every morning learning Italian on Duolingo (currently on a 453 day streak) or with Penton Overseas, Inc. Learn in Your Car CDs while driving. At this point, though not fluent, I can understand more than I ever did. But Italians prefer to converse rapidly, their emotions often blurring the meaning of their words. I can only speak slowly, haltingly. At best I sound like a contemplative consigliare confiding precious wisdom. In reality, I may be saying something like pass me the toilet paper with some cheese on a shoe with your right foot.
According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, "travel and tourism is the largest single services export for the United States." It's such a valued commodity that our trading partners come here to get it! In fact, over 13M tourists visiting NYC are from other countries. Most of these visitors probably speak English at least well enough to get by. Still, considering that about 700,000 are Italian speakers and for other personal reasons, learning Italian, a language I am already familiar with, isn't such a bad investment.
As a sightseeing guide, it's my job to share New York with visitors from the rest of the world. I'm a New Yorker, after all, and ought to cultivate a cosmopolitan outlook. I live in the proverbial melting pot, a city where nearly half the population speaks English as a second language. Sure. I believe that Brooklyn is the center of the universe, but if I don't at least try to see from the outside in it's more difficult to convince my guests. That's why I like to travel, connect with people from other countries and learn another language. One day, I'd like to say that I speak three languages: Brooklynese, American English and Italian.