This is an interview with Vio, a 15-year-old girl in her first year of high school. She’s been learning English since the first year of primary school (so when she was 6 years old) and she has always enjoyed studying English and other languages, thinking about the beauty of being able to communicate with people from other countries.
At school she is now studying three languages, English, French, and Spanish, but she
obviously is more confident about her English because she has studied it for a longer time,
but she gets along well with French too; on the other hand, she feels a bit weak in Spanish,
which she has only been studying for a few months.
Vio is very interested in the different cultures of other countries and finds them very important and useful to learn more about the place but also about the language; she told me how she would like to have experiences abroad to improve her pronunciation and get to know cultures and local people to learn even things that are not written in books.
But before having these experiences, she tries to improve her pronunciation and
knowledge of the language by watching many films and TV series in original language: she
confessed that first she prefers to watch them with subtitles in Italian, as sometimes the
dialogues can be too fast, but with things she has already seen and already knows, she also tries to set the subtitles in the original language and on this we agreed, since it is a method that I use and find very useful too. Not only movies and TV series, but Vio also listens music, trying to understand the words of the songs and goes looking for the text to better understand the meaning. So we learned that even a karaoke evening could be useful to practice the language!!!
But in the end, as it should be, she finds that all languages and all aspects of a language are important from grammar to vocabulary knowledge and pronunciation and, as she is still
very young, she is looking forward to improving the languages she is already studying and
learn more.