I spent a few years in Italy but never learned the language properly(my only Italian friend there happened to speak my language - Polish), still it strikes me a

I spent a few years in Italy but never learned the language properly(my only Italian friend there happened to speak my language - Polish), still it strikes me as odd that Italians should have issues with learning English when the two languages are grammatically much closer than English or Italian is to e.g. any Slavic language. Thing is, the way I speak Italian is I use English as an intermediary language, because at least the tenses are somewhat similar. Of course this strategy falls flat on its face in a more complex conversation, because spoken Italian is chock full of phrases - my favourite being "in bocca al lupo" - which taken literally translates to "in the wolf's mouth!" (note the lack of predicate here) and to me sounds no different than "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra". One other thing is that during my time in that country I was surprised to note that the IT job market there is actually a little smaller than in my native Poland. Weirdly enough the salaries are roughly the same - especially after taxes. I can't explain this, because I met a lot of smart and passionate about their work people in Italy.