Last week I made an interview about the knowledge of the English language and I had the pleasure to get to know better a girl who attends the first year in my school.
This is the story of a girl who attends the first year in my same school. She has a special attitude and she is pretty mature for her age, she is only fourteen but she reflects a lot on her learning.
I asked her a lot of question about her relationship with languages for example if it’s easy or hard to learn them or if she has some experiences abroad and how she can make herself understood by other people. I was very fascinated by her way of thinking and reflecting but mostly for her age because she is only fourteen!
At first Ale told me that she has been studying English since she was very little and she enjoyed very much learning it but at some point, she decided to choose the scientific program, so the language took the second place. Despite this she never gave up so, after school she watches films or tv series in English to improve her listening skills: she admitted that she has to watch them with subtitles in Italian because she doesn’t understand many words.
Every day she also tries to improve her pronunciation: for example, she sings English songs reading the lyrics and she chats or video calls an American friend. There’s only one thing she’s afraid of: not to be good at speaking and to not make herself understood by other people, but I comforted her saying that we are Italians so we can communicate using gestures!
Moreover, we spoke about the importance to know the culture of a country especially if you want to live there. She believes that it is important and mostly useful to travel and to take a small aspect of all the cultures of the world: it can help you to improve your general knowledge. For example, she told me she desires to go to Norway or to New York.
Ale also told me she would like to make a year abroad, possibly the fourth year of high school, to have the opportunity to study there with a completely different method and to see with her eyes if America is for real the country, we all dream of. She learnt Spanish in the middle school, and she had the opportunity to go to Spain and there she experienced how speaking a language can help you develop relationships and communicate with local people. This is one of the reasons why she wants to improve her English in order to spend a period in a so another reason to improve her English language is to go to an English-speaking country.
At the end, she said that in the future she would like to study also Russian and Chinese, even if she is a bit worried because they are very difficult; so, at the end of your conversation I told her the next one will be in Russian. We both laughed and we said goodbye.
I have to thank Ale for being helpful I also hope she enjoyed our chat.