Have you ever lost your mind over a foreign language? In Episode 572: A Crazy Student Falls in Love with Italian, we’re joined by Melissa Muldoon, who did just that over 15 years ago, when she dove head first into studying the Italian language. She was so crazy about Italian in fact, that she dubbed herself the “Studentessa Matta” (crazy student) and started blogging about her Italian-learning journey… in Italian.
What began as a blog to flex her Italian writing skills has turned into a career as an Italian language teacher and coach, an Italian cultural ambassador, an author of historical fiction set in Italy, and a leader of immersive language and culture trips to Italy, which she hosts twice a year.
Melissa joins us to talk about her journey to learn Italian, what made her go “crazy” for it, and—perhaps most valuably—how she manages to incorporate the Italian language into her daily life without actually living in Italy.
You can listen to the episode right here, or find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and elsewhere.
Related Episodes:
Episode 518 The Limitations of Language
Episode 430 Does Language Shape Thinking?
Episode 281 Living Life in a Foreign Language
Episode 63 LANGUAGE, Part 3 (with J J Michael)
Bittersweet Moment #54: Learning to Read in Two Languages at Once
Bittersweet Moment #3: LANGUAGE
Five key takeaways from the episode:
- Melissa Muldoon, founder of Studentessa Matta website, initially disliked learning languages but developed a passion for Italian later in life, leading her to start a blog, write novels, and teach the language.
- She emphasizes the importance of immersion in language learning, using various methods like watching movies, reading books, and writing daily to improve skills when unable to travel.
- Melissa believes anyone can learn a language at any age if they have intrinsic motivation and dedication, rather than external pressures.
- She highlights the value of audiobooks, book clubs, and engaging with native speakers to enhance language learning and cultural understanding.
- While Melissa spends significant time in Italy and has deep connections there, she prefers maintaining her American life and visiting Italy for extended periods rather than permanently relocating.
Full Episode Transcript:
Katy
Welcome to Rome. This is the Bittersweet Life with Katie Sewell and Tiffany Parks. Hello. This is the Bittersweet Life. I’m Katie Sewell.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
Tiffany in Rome, Katie in Seattle. And we do have a special guest today, but before we bring her in, I want to just do a quick thank you. If you’ve been listening to the show every week, you know that we put out the call to try to replace my very trusty, very old traveling microphone, the very microphone that Tiffany and I started this show on back in 2013. It was a kicking the bucket. We can just say I had had it repaired once before and in that lasted for a little while, and then it was falling apart. And so we put out the call asking those of you who love the show if you wouldn’t mind helping us afford to buy a new microphone. And we made it. We made the goal. The microphone was ordered. It just arrived. It looks beautiful. It actually looks exactly like the microphone that we used to have, but it’s, what, 10, 12 years newer? And so I just wanted to give a shout out to the names of the people who chipped in to help us get that microphone. So thank you very much to Jill and Joanne and Susan and Yula and Robert and John and another Susan, Linda, Stefania, and Karen. Thank you so much to all of you. And we did have one anonymous person, so thank you. Anonymous person as well, who did not want to be named. You guys are the best. And of course, it’s never too late to support this show. If you really love it, just look in the show notes to find ways to keep us going. So thank you so much.
Melissa Muldoon
Thank you.
Katy
All right, Tiffany, why don’t you introduce our guest? Okay.
Tiffany
Well, today we are joined by Melissa Muldoon, who is the founder of the Studentessa Matta website, which is now in its 15th year. And this website, which began as a blog about Melissa’s journey to learn Italian, has since grown into a platform where she teaches Italian herself and offers online conversation practice. Melissa also hosts the podcast Tutti Matti Per l’Italiano and runs the MATTA YouTube channel. She’s the author of four novels set in Florence, Arezzo, and Rome, featuring female Italian historical figures such as Isabella de Medici, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Sofonisba Anguissola. And as if that were not enough, she also leads immersive language and cultural trips to Italy twice a year. So thank you, Melissa, so much for joining us.
Melissa Muldoon
Congratulations. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you.
Katy
Wow, you’ve been busy, Melissa. That’s all I can say. Yes, thank you so much for being here. I think both Tiffany and I have a lot of questions for you. Tiffany, do you want to kick it off?
Tiffany
Yeah, I would love to know. Because you know, all of us Italophiles have our own story. What is your story? How did you come to love Italy and the Italian language particularly? What was the thing that brought you to that love?
Melissa Muldoon
Well, I’m an artist and I have had a 20 year career as a graphic designer. I went to Florence when I was in college and I didn’t go there to study the language. I wanted to have a foreign abroad experience. I grew up in the Midwest, my dad was a college professor and so we had had foreign exchange students with us and I was just wanting to have my own foreign exchange program. And I went to study art, I went to study painting and I went to study art history. Most of the kids there were there to study Italian. I had five years of German under my belt and I had no desire to study a language and didn’t think I really had a talent for a language. So I spent most of my time skipping classes because I made my teachers cry because I couldn’t conjugate verbs. And when I came home, I threw away my dictionary, never thinking I would need it again. But I came home and started my career. I got married. I had three lovely boys. It was going great, but I wanted something only for myself. And my mother sent me a book about, I think it was Francis Mai’s book Under the Tuscan Son. And I read it and I was really ashamed I hadn’t learned more of the language, all the Italian words that were rolling around in that book. And so I surprised my husband. I just went out to a bookstore and I bought my first grammar book and I just started learning the language. I didn’t open my mouth for a full year. I was just absorbing, trying to. It was like a big puzzle. I wanted to put together and figure out how all the pieces worked. And then I started reaching out. As I reached the next level, I went to evening classes. I started doing everything under the sun to create this immersion at home. Because I couldn’t travel, I had a career. I had three little kids under my desk doodling and doing their homework. And one night after about, I don’t know, I’ve been studying for a while, my husband was out traveling. I had a big bottle of wine on the desk and I said I had to start a blog. What’s it going to be? About, of course, Italy. Because at that point, I was learning everything from the language. I was watching movies, I was learning all about the culture, reading, starting to read books. And I wanted to offer back to people who were starting their language learning journey to advice, concealy things that I done to reach my. Where I was at, at that level. And so I started this blog, and at first it was all in Italian, and I wanted to. I was a purist. I was learning the language, sharing my secrets. And every time I went into a bookstore, I was always looking for that silver bullet, that book that was going to put me over the edge and make me fluent. But what really counted was writing. Every day on this blog site, I wrote, I had friends who joined me, who then became Facebook friends, or my Facebook friends joined me, and we had conversations. It gave me a purpose every day to write and think and be in Italy. If I couldn’t be there physically, I created my own Italy at home. And my kids grew up thinking I was this crazy pazza, matta woman who thought she was Italian. Well, I have no Italian blood at all. I’ve done the DNA tests. I have no, no blood line at all to Italy. But it’s just like something within me, something about the country really spoke to me. I like. I like the family orientedness of the. Of the culture and the food and just the art, obviously, and the language, it was just beautiful. And when I started traveling, then kids got older, took my husband to Italy. Amazing things happened when I opened my mouth and started speaking the language. I remember one night we were in Gubbio and. And we were in a bar late at night, and I was not leaving this country until I actually have a conversation with a real person. Not a waiter, not a taxi driver. But they’re happy to talk to you. And I’m happy to talk to them too. The people are so amazing when you open your mouth and actually speak. And it doesn’t matter if you’re mixing up your words or your grammar tenses. And so we started having this conversation over wine, the whole bar. It was a tiny little place about music. And then at one point, a gentleman stood up and said, “Signora, venga con me.” And I was like, oh, yes, let’s go. And my husband, no, he’s an axe murderer. We can’t follow him. But we did. We went up and down through the streets of Gubbio, and he took out this huge key, unlocked this huge door, and literally the language opened a door for me because he was a truffle hunter. And he started opening all these, you know, marmalades that he had made in his own recipes, and he opened a bottle of wine, and there we were having this amazing party and. And we kept in touch after that. I wrote to him, you know, that was so cool. That was so cool. I want to bring this experience to other people who come with me to have them get past their inhibitions and try to speak and have these experiences that I was having.
Katy
Wow. Yeah. I feel like you are the first person that has ever had a literal door open for them on this, on this entire journey we’ve been on in The Bittersweet Life by learning a language. That’s fantastic.
Tiffany
How much time. I’m just curious. The timeline. So you were in college when you went and studied art in Italy, and the language at that time, it did not capture you. So how many years between then and when you picked up that grammar book? I’m just curious. And did something happen? Did you see an Italian film? Did you. Were you reminiscing about your travels? Like, what happened to.
Melissa Muldoon
I think at one point, I think working women? I don’t know. I just was sharing so much of myself with my family that I just really wanted something all my own. And it became this project, and it just. It just. It captured my imagination. Not only was the blog a really interesting way for me to talk about the language, but it also brought in all my creativity as well, because I was then illustrating and creating images to match because I really wanted it to pop and have some kind of emotive feel. So reaching out to people so that they. They would stay engaged. And as I said, the first time, the first year or two, I was just writing in Italian. And after a bit, schools in Italy started reaching out to me and invited me to put together small groups to come and study at their schools. And so that fit perfectly with my idea that to learn a language, you need to know the culture, and to know the culture, you need to learn the language. But there’s so many idioms, food idioms in Italian, language that go just because they’re such big foodies. And so that spoke to me, being able to take that experience that I had in Gubbio to open up doors for other people who wanted to come with me. After I did the first one, you know, another school contacted me, so I started traveling around Italy. And every step of the way, it’s not. I never set out with this plan 15 years ago, I’m going to be doing this, and I’m going to be taking people to Italy. Everything Just organically unfolded. My husband said to me once after I’d been writing the blog, he said, when are you going to write your book? And I’m like, what book? I’m not going to write a book. And then I sat and thought about it for a while and I thought, you know, every day I’m writing this, this blog, every day I’m writing every day I’m putting together creative things to share with people. And in a way I find writing then is very creative. And it’s like painting with words. In fact, some, some of my reviewers have said that reading my books, it’s like reading. She illustrates with words and she creates this painting with her words. The first book about dreaming Sophia takes place in Florence. And it’s kind of my own autobiography in some ways. My stay with my Italian family, the things I learned, the faux pas you make or the, the inspiration, the things that you learn about Italy and how it kind of gets into you and changes you a little bit. I not thinking I’m going to get famous and rich from this book, but I just want to put it out there and have it be accepted and read by people. And I finished that and then I’m like, I have all this knowledge now about making a book and writing a book. I got to write another one.
Katy
So what it’s going to be about.
Melissa Muldoon
And so that’s. At that point I had been in Arezzo, which is now my, my, my place, my go to place, my hometown, my. All the people in Loretz are my family. And I wrote a book about the Giostra del Saracino, which is the big jousting festival. I just kept going, writing more.
Katy
That’s good. Building upon everything. I mean, since you were saying Italians having so many things that they can talk about with food, things that you learn over time. When you’re learning Italian, do you actually have a typical Italian saying or thought that is like one of your favorite ones?
Melissa Muldoon
I can’t wait to return.
Katy
Do you feel like there’s a section of Italian that you still have yet to understand?
Melissa Muldoon
I’m working on it.
Tiffany
Oh, that’s so funny because I’m learning that now. I’ve been living in Rome for 20 years and I’m just now learning the passato remoto because my son is learning it in school and this summer I had to quiz him on all these different verbs, you know, because. And I got to the point where I’m like, I can figure out what it’s going to be even if I don’t know it. And he was doing the same. He was figuring it out, I was figuring out. I’m like, I got the passato remoto.
Melissa Muldoon
Well, it’s mostly a literary tense, and if you can figure out the root of the verb, I mean, I read books all the time and I’m reading passato romoto. It’s just really hard to pull it out of your brain because it is so irregular, so unexpected. I got into teaching, actually, at one point I made this kind of like, change because I was the studente learning, learning, learning. And then all of a sudden, here it was in Multipulciano. I had my group of people and we were going on an excursion, and there are other people from Ilsaso, which is the school in Multipliciano, Silvia Telli school. And this woman came up to me and she goes, melissa, you know, I’m learning all this stuff in my class, but I have no one to practice with. And it’s really. It’s difficult because I don’t really. I’m not grasping concepts. I’m not having the practice that I need. Would you sit down with me and go over my homework with me? And I thought, this is interesting. You know, I can help people in this way by just going, reviewing things with them. And then during COVID my programs were shut down. Obviously, we couldn’t travel. And so then I started teaching online, and I went through qualification for this online serving tutor service. And then I thought, you know, one of the first assignments I had was a high school student, honor student who needed to learn the passato Romolto. And I got this request, and I was like, oh, my goodness, you know, so I’m studying the whole weekend, ready to study, you know, teach this kid. But then I realized when I met him, he could barely conjugate present tense verbs. They basically just wanted him to recognize it. Take like, the first five most important Italian verbs. And so when you come across Pinocchio, when you open Pinocchio, it’s filled with the first, you know, two paragraphs. If you can train yourself so you don’t freak out when you read a book and you see it, you can identify it and you can figure out pretty much what’s being said. So when I figured that out, I’m like, okay, I got this. And then we went on, you know, easier after that.
Tiffany
But how long do you think you were studying Italian before you started teaching it?
Melissa Muldoon
So the blog’s about 15 years old, but I had started about five years prior to that. So I don’t know. I always think to myself, you know, I’m not fluent yet, but I think fluency now is. Is relative. If you can make somebody laugh and you’re having a good time and you’re just kind of stumbling through it, that’s a form of fluency. And I’m really hard on myself because I’m like, I can be better. I can get better. I can. All the prepositions, you know, you’re still. You know, there’s so many nuances.
Tiffany
But on the other hand, I think a teacher who understands the struggles coming from an English background is also useful for students who, you know, I. I have a lot of Italian people ask me grammar about English, and I’m like, I don’t know, because I just grew up speaking it. I understand the structure better.
Melissa Muldoon
I learned English grammar better when I started learning Italian. Like, what’s the conditional? What’s the preposition? What’s the, you know, direct object, Blah, blah, blah. And it’s true. People come to me and they. I start teaching them and working with them, and they’re like, I’m glad I picked you, because, you know, I’ve worked with Italian. Nothing wrong with. I have loads of Italian teachers who are lovely, but they don’t quite. They just kind of ratt. They don’t understand my struggles coming from an English, you know, background. I kind of been there, done that. And I know, for example, when I started learning Italian, I brushed through those first beginning chapters or pages, really, about how to pronounce Italian sounds, and it came back to bite me. I was not pronouncing my double consonants. And in. In Venice, one friend said, “Melissa, make sure you prolong the n in anno, because you’re not. That’s not a good thing.”
Tiffany
Just to clarify for Katie and anyone who’s listening, anno with a double n is year, and anno with a single n is anus. So you got to be careful with words like that.
Melissa Muldoon
Such a big thing for you to be understood and for them Italians to understand you to make the right sounds. Most Americans learning the language, when they say restaurant, say restaurante, it’s restaurante. You have to have that. That E. You have to really concentrate, make those. Those vowels.
Tiffany
Because in Italian, vowels are very pure, and in English, they’re very muddled. So you can kind of get away with muddling your vowels, and you have.
Melissa Muldoon
To, because that’s very important to tell you whether it’s a masculine, feminine, and everything falls, everything’s married, you know, adjectives, everything goes together. And double consonant, it can change the entire word like you said with ano and but casa. Casa so many things it just changes the entire. You can get pick it up through context.
Tiffany
But pen is another classic.
Melissa Muldoon
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Katy
So is that where you have your students start is with that very basic. Because I was going to ask you when it comes to teaching people a brand new language, say you have a student that comes to you being basically knowing nothing. You know, where do you even begin?
Melissa Muldoon
I go through that. I go through like son yo sono. Can you hear the difference when I say it? So I’m always trying to help bring that out. The best pronunciation possible.
Katy
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Melissa Muldoon
Average bear and yes, probably, but it scared me. I hate, I hated standing up and talking in German class when you have to give responses. And I think if it comes from deep inside and you really, really want to learn, there’s no stopping you. If it’s extrinsic and people are saying, oh, you got to go get an A or you got to go do this. You got to get this to go on and do something else. You don’t have that much invested in it. And at that time, I think I just totally, it was just all burning inside me. I just wanted to do it so. And I think you can learn at any language. I think it’s a big cop out, big excuse if people say they don’t, you know, I’m too old to learn it. You just aren’t putting enough time or setting aside enough time to do it either because you really don’t want to or you’re just doing it extrinsically.
Tiffany
Well, I love what you talked when you were talking about at the beginning about how you, you know, all the different things that you did to bring Italian into your life because you couldn’t travel at that time. So, so that’s my question because, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people want to learn a language and, you know, a lot of people do put in the time and the work and to learn it and to become proficient. But beyond maybe a trip here and there, they don’t have the opportunity to speak the language in their own hometown. So how can an average person who maybe I don’t know that writing every single day in Italian on a blog is, is for everybody. So what do you have any other tips?
Melissa Muldoon
Oh, yeah.
Tiffany
For people to bring the language into.
Melissa Muldoon
Their daily life, it’s not only writing about it. You have to be speaking it, listening to it, listening to it, having it multiple ways. You can watch a Netflix movie now in almost any language. You can change over the settings so you can hear the language. Audiobooks, I think, are the best ways to achieving fluency. So I started a book club because I was watching a Netflix movie, Sylvia Zuka’s La Guida Astrologica di Quarry Enfranchise Tea. So I ran out and I got the book and I the audiobook, and I started listening to it, and I’m like, this would make a really cool book club. So I threw it out there that afternoon. I just put out there, and by the end of the night, I had like three people sign up already. And it’s a difficult book, but I create reader notes. And we. We read the book and threw this out. At the very first meeting, I said, and you know what? By the end, I’m going to have Sylvia Zuka come onto our book club, Zoom Call, and she’s going to talk to us about her book. Laughingly, ha, ha ha. But as we got into it and we were coming to the end, I’m like, hey, wouldn’t that be really cool if we really got Sylvia Zuka? And so I looked all over the Internet and I contacted her. And by 6 o’clock the next morning, she responded, oh, my God, I can’t believe it. American women are reading your book. My book. And she was so thrilled, she invited herself onto my show or onto my book club, and we got to be friends. And when I showed up in Milan a year later, she and I went out and we had a afternoon together and she showed me her Milan, as she called it. And I think what I love about the Italian language, I know I’m getting off track of the original question, but I become a different person when I speak Italian. I pretty much am a homebody. I like to just do my thing, do my work, do my writing, do my creative stuff at home. Couldn’t care if I talked to anybody for three weeks. When I go to Italy, it’s all about, I will talk to anybody who will talk back to me, and I will. And they do. And. And we become friends. And all of a sudden we’re having these experiences. Just like the waiter at one of these little seaside towns turned out his girlfriend was medic at the Jostra. And all of a sudden we were like, oh, you know, we had this in common. We were talking, and I just like the connections. And I become a more open. I don’t know what it is about the language, but it just. Not everybody’s like that. And I understand when they’re learning, they’re intimidated about speaking with other people, but I’m like, I chose Matta as my crazy student because I Think wonderful things happen when you really open up and you just forget about, you know, you forget about your inhibitions, you forget about being right perfect. And if you just kind of like throw yourself in there and I will knock on doors when people are, shouldn’t do that, I’m like, yeah, let’s go try get invited in. And we.
Katy
Why, why would you say that you’re not, why would you say you’re not that way when you’re at home?
Melissa Muldoon
I like to get things done. I’m very focused. I like to, I, I like my creativity. I like to be creative at home. And it’s, I set that aside when I go to Italy. I’m not there to focus on fixing my website.
Tiffany
One last question. I see you live in Austin, Texas when you’re not in Italy, very different from Italy. Would you ever consider, especially as your kids maybe are getting older, I don’t know where they are, if they’re out of the house yet or not quite. But like, would you ever move to Italy?
Melissa Muldoon
I don’t think so. I like my American life. I like the ease of my American life. But I spend three months of the year in Italy because I like, I like the adventure. I like traveling around Italy. And my Italian friends say you’ve been probably more places in Italy than I have. I live in Rome or Milan and you know, when we go traveling we have to go see family or we only go one place and I go visit my homestay teachers or I, I drag my husband, please. He’s a good, he doesn’t speak Italian, but he’s my autista and he will go anywhere I go. And I don’t want to marry Italy. I want to have the love affair with Italy. So I rent apartments. I don’t. Everybody said, what are you going to buy your house? And I’m, I don’t really want to be tied to one place in Italy, but I want to embrace the entire country, so to speak, and have the, the flexibility. But Arezzo, like I said, that is my all go to place. I just love it there.
Katy
Well, we’re going to put your website in the show notes, but do you want to tell people how to find you if they need an Italian teacher or any other.
Melissa Muldoon
Yeah, you, me, I’m still at www.studentessamatta.com. It’s student. It’s kind of a hard, people have a hard time with that. But Matta.com just one other thing. So the language just has opened so many doors to people and the people connection is the thing that drives really, my language. Learning, learning, meeting friends. Amazing things can happen, I think, if you really put your mind to it.
Katy
Well, Melissa, thank you so much for coming on and joining us on the show. It’s really great to meet you and to hear your story.
Melissa Muldoon
It’s nice to meet you guys, too.
Tiffany
Yes, your enthusiasm is infectious.
Katy
All right, well, we will leave it there. And until next time, this is the Bittersweet Life. I’m Katie Sewell.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
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