Language acquisition

The thirteenth entry is l’attitudine alle lingue, and the noun is a false friend that an English reader misreads twice over. L’attitudine means aptitude: a natural turn for something, a capacity that can be measured before it has been used. Ha attitudine per la matematica says that the person is built for the subject, not that they think well of it. What English calls « attitude » — the stance somebody takes towards a thing, approving or hostile — is l’atteggiamento, and the two nouns are never interchangeable. The trap is sharper on this page than anywhere else, because the field keeps both ideas in play and keeps them apart on purpose. L’attitudine alle lingue is the capacity a learner brings to the work, the thing the older testing literature tried to predict from memory and from ear. The attitude a learner holds towards the language and the people who speak it is a different matter, and it is what stands behind la motivazione integrativa further down the list. Reading the first as the second turns a sentence about talent into a sentence about goodwill, and the two rarely travel together.