attended with any more difficulty than the immersing of one's self
in a study day after day and month after month learning the
irregular verbs from a grammar.

My rule in studying a language is to seize upon some salient point,
or one generally overlooked by foreigners, or some very subtle one
known only to the scholar, and devote myself to its mastery. A
little knowledge here blinds the hearer to much ignorance
elsewhere. In Italian, for example, the polite way of addressing
one's equal is to speak in the third person singular, using Ella
(she) as the pronoun. "Come sta Ella?" (How are you? but
literally "How is she?")

I pay great attention to this detail, and make opportunities to
meet our padrona on the staircase and say "How is she?" to her. I
can never escape the feeling that I am inquiring for the health of
an absent person; moreover, I could not understand her symptoms if
she should recount them, and I have no language in which to
describe my own symptoms, which, so far as I have observed, is the
only reason we ever ask anybody else how he feels.

To remember on the instant whether one is addressing equals,
superiors, or inferiors, and to marshal hastily the proper pronoun,
adds a new terror to conversation, so that I find myself constantly
searching my memory to decide whether it shall be:

Scusate or Scusi, Avanti or Passi, A rivederci or Addio, Che cosa
dite? or Che coma dice? Quanto domandate? or Quanto domanda? Dove
andate? or Dove va? Come vi chiamate? or Come si chiama? and so
forth and so forth until one's mind seems to be arranged in