Learning Italian sends Jason Goodwin down a route he’d never have expected — and his life is all the richer for it.
I once took a short course in Mandarin at the Beijing Language Institute, hoping to secure a student card that would let me travel around the country. The teaching method was straight out of Mao’s Little Red Book, all of us in class reciting phrases in unison. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I am from England.’ ‘How many people in your family?’…
