Daily writing prompt

What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?

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I took French in college, and made an effort to keep up with it because I wanted to read Rostand, Zola, and Camus in the original. Once I’ve limbered up my vocabulary (which is actually similar to English) I can read French tolerably well, but I have a hard time understanding spoken French beyond a few scattered words. And my accent is atrocious.

There are other languages I think are more beautiful to hear. Russian, for one, and Italian. In my daydreams, I am accomplished in both.

The first, the language of Tolstoy and Chekhov, sounds to me like the thunder of a waterfall. The only drawback is that some people seem to respond viscerally to it. My mother-in-law, whose parents fled the Ukraine in the early 1900s, told me her own mother would shudder if she overheard Russian being spoken, and a relative who grew up in Eastern Europe told me last night she had a similar reaction. The legacy of a powerful, and bellicose country. I bet there are plenty of people in the world who react that way to hearing English.

Italian, the language of opera, always seems to have music behind its rise and fall, its light syllables, but getting beyond “Grazi” has always defeated me. I’ve visited Italy twice, and both times I usually dried when put on the spot about speaking the language. All I could remember were lines from Tosca. “Sospetti di spia!” and “Ti soffoca il sangue?” which are not easy phrases to slide into a casual conversation.