I’ll be headed to Europe later this year, and Italy is on the list of places to possibly visit. So I need to pick up conversational Italian enough to get me around and at least understand things said to me, like “How much do you want to spend?”, “Do you want more towels?”, and “I can take you there in five minutes, if you want to go, but we should hurry.”
The downside is I’ve never studied Italian in any capacity. But the upside is that I’ve studied Latin superficially and I know enough Spanish to get around Spain comfortably. Since Italian is in between these two, I think I already know a good bit of the language.
So considering all of that, what area should I focus on? I don’t want to get all phrasebook-y and memorize set sentences; I want to be able to construct sentences on the fly and interpret at least half of the words that are said to me. Should I memorize verbs? Travel nouns? Syntax?
There’s not much time, and I’d like the lessons to stick. So where do I start?