Starting today, we will be taking midterms. The sad part about that previous
sentence is it feels like I just got here. So that means that time is going by
way too quickly. I only have a month and a half left.
I signed up for this program called Chat Pals. The Chat
Pal program at FUA is where you get paired with an Italian person trying to
learn English or your native language (There are some students who speak
Portuguese and other things here.) You are supposed to meet with them at least
once a week and speak 30 mins in Italian and then 30 mins in English.
My Chat Pal’s name is Martina. She
is super nice and around the same age as me. I am very lucky to have her
because she knows English pretty well. She has been the United States a couple
of times, to larger places like New York, Las Vegas and some cities in California.
We talked about a great deal of things like her family, what types of food she
likes and what her and her friends do when they hang out. She says that the
amount of Italian that I do know is very good because I told her that I came
here without ever taking an Italian class. I feel that there is still so much
Italian that I have to learn and she understands English like perfectly. I only
need to help her with her English when she forgets a word or provide her with
an alternative word or phrase for saying something.
 |
| Dante's Rock |
 |
| Michaelangelo's Self Portrait |
For
our first meeting, I met Martina, in Piazza della Repubblica and we went for a
walk around the city square. She showed me things that most tourist don’t know
about like the rock that Dante would sit on and watch the Duomo being built and
a self-portrait of Michelangelo scratched into the side of Palazzo Vecchio,
which is actually the town hall in Florence. We also went to see Dante’s church
and house. She was surprised that I didn’t know much about Dante and hadn’t
read any of the books such as Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. That only made
me wish that I had read Dante’s Inferno in high school.
 |
| Dante's Church |
I
learned a great deal by just walking around with her, aside from more Italian.
She told me about history in Florence and also about other things about Italy
in general. I didn’t know that different cities in Italy had different dialects
depending on what country they were under until they became a part of Italy.
Other countries such as Switzerland and Austria controlled different cities in
Italy and that affects the ability of a person from Florence from being able to
talk to a person from Naples (they can barely understand them. Only a couple of
words are similar,) I also learned that they only started teaching English in
schools approximately 20 years ago. Before that, children were taught French in
school, so that is primarily why older generations don’t really know
English.
My main goal is to be able to
understand what people are saying during daily activities but I know that it is
going to take lots and lots of practice. Hopefully, this Chat Pal partnership
will help me speed the process up. I also hope to gain a lifelong friend as
well.
