At the beginning of my path
I come from a small village in Northern Italy. Here, I developed the passion for mountains and outdoor activities. The wilderness allows you to meet people in a way that does not take place in cities. It also teaches you a different way to interact with people that came in clutch during my adulthood.
Credit: Carlo.benini, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
College days and new languages
After High School, I moved to Bologna to attend college, the University of Bologna, considered the oldest one in the world. Given that all of my life took place in a small village, I wasn’t used to big cities; Bologna, with 350k people, looked already a metropolis to me. There, I started my way journey discovering new cultures.
As a result, I found out the value of knowing the ubiquitous English. Foreign languages also taught me how to look at my own culture from an external point of view. I realized how diverse the world: at that point we could say that I finally came to the world, in the broader terms of this word.
I eventually graduated from “DAMS” (department of art, music and cinema) with a degree on social media communication of celebrities with a multilingual audience. Although I wrote my work in Italian, the main sources were all in English and I dealt with them with (almost) no effort. I could see languages becoming a quintessential part of my education.
How the language affected my life
In the meantime a big event occurred on our planet, Covid 19, with big consequences on my story. Since I had to spend a lot of time at home, I started studying Russian on my own. Even though an interest for it had already grown, I didn’t try to approach it before. After only 3 months, I had such amazing results that I felt so proud of me.
As this meme shows, I would be a liar if I said that everything was going accordingly. The Russian language has an extremely different structure and grammar compared to Latin languages or English. YouTube and some other online resources weren’t enough anymore, despite having been useful. My motivation started to crumble like Paçocas and I unfortunately stopped my Russian journey.
Even if this is true, Languages undeniably became part of my life. At the end of the 2021 summer, I moved to France without knowing the language and with no plan for the future. French was mostly new to me but I already studied it when I was 11. Furthermore, the grammar and the syntax were so much more familiar to me than the Russian ones. For all of this reasons, I manged to quickly learn French and that boosted my confidence like never before.
I travelled like a nomad across France and I met wonderful people. They helped me with this new language. Many of them didn’t do that through English, that I also refused to use in my everyday life. What they did was to adapt their output to make it easier and therefore clearer to me. Apart from EN and FR, I am now learning Russian, Turkish and Portuguese.
The present of my life
I’m currently working as an Italian teacher to foreigners with a wide linguistic background. I have students from 16 different countries. Languages finally came in handy! I offer customized lessons for each student. Take a look to my My method page to discover more about my classes, my experience, the method i use and what inspires me.
I also have multiple projects going on such as: a YouTube channel and a community of language lovers ready to grow on Instagram. I am in contact with different cultures everyday and that motivates me to share useful content about my native language.