Giogi

Giogi is a 17 year-old girl, who lives in Milan. Although she attends the Applied Sciences high school, she is very interested in studying languages, especially English.

She started studying English at elementary school, where she managed to learn some basic grammar structures and vocabulary. Year after year, she has become more and more interested in this language, its structure and vocabulary.

Nowadays she still likes English, although she finds some aspects more difficult than others. For instance, she loves watching films and TV series in original language, but she finds it more difficult to speak with other people.

As I said before, speaking is the skill she has the most trouble with, because you have to be able to use grammatical structures and vocabulary, but also keep the conversation going on. Anyway, she

does her best and when she doesn’t know a word, she attempts to express her ideas in other words, in order to be understood.

In her school experience, she has discovered that the best way to learn English is doing a lot of grammar exercises and always focusing on conversation, both with classmates and teachers. In high school she has developed a lot of skills and now she can understand people speaking English.

Moreover, she believes that having experiences abroad is very important to improve your level, because you necessarily speak that language and you have to find ways to express your ideas, even the most difficult ones. From her point of view, it is also important to know something about the culture of the country, because you can get more interested in studying the language, in every aspect, as it could give you a better understanding of the origin of the words and the language journey over the years.

During her studies, she had the opportunity to study Spanish too. She began learning it in middle school and she attended an extra Spanish course in high school. She likes both languages, but she feels more comfortable with English. She thinks that studying two languages is not easy, but she has learnt that you could find similarities between them, and that this can help you so much. It can help you memorize vocabulary, grammatical structure and the meaning of the words.

Furthermore, she suggests that all the students and new learners should listen to music, learn the lyrics, watch films in the original language, maybe with subtitles. She also recommends thatstudents should download apps in order to keep practicing, but they also should make experiences abroad.

Precisely about this, two years ago, she was in England to take a two-week English course and she lived with a host family. On the first night, she was very shy and so embarrassed that, when her host-mum asked her what she wanted to do the next day, she replied;I want to go to the beach; but with a shorter ‘’E’’. Immediately after, she realized what she had said but everyone laughed because it is a common mistakamong Italian people. After that episode she learnt how to say ‘beach’ correctly!

Lastly, she believes English is one of the most beautiful languages, to study and to practice! The advice she can give everybody is to feel confident and to continue practicing and, above all, to make experiences abroad, in order to grow as a person and to master the language!