Chunfeng

handwritten version ✍🏻 – digital version 

Translation:

Hello everyone,

I am a graduate student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. Since my major is stage design, strong language skills are particularly important as it involves a lot of technical terms and reading scripts for each design project. Although I attended a language school and graduated successfully when I first came to Italy, I realized that the real challenges began when I started studying at the Academy.

I am not a particularly smart person, or rather, my study methods are quite slow, so learning Italian has been very difficult for me. However, since I met Brandon online, my language skills have improved. In just over a month, I went from being afraid to communicate with my Italian classmates to actively finding topics to talk about with them.

Brandon always starts by correcting pronunciation, because only correct pronunciation allows others to understand the words you are saying. At first, my pronunciation was terrible, and I quickly realized that this not only affected communication with others but also increased the difficulty of learning the language itself. Every time I made a pronunciation mistake, Brandon patiently corrected me. Additionally, whenever I made grammatical errors during our conversations, he promptly corrected my mistakes and explained in detail why I made them and how to avoid them in the future.

He also uses very interesting and fun teaching methods to improve language fluency and vocabulary, such as singing, watching cartoons, and movie clips, and then role-playing the characters together. This gives students the opportunity to try using Italian in different contexts, which ultimately helps them develop that natural feel typical of native speakers. To be honest, I am not someone who likes to sing, but during my time with Brandon, I gradually became more positive and willing to express my inner thoughts, and I can even sing easily, despite being tone-deaf 😂. This method is really effective for quickly improving language fluency in Italian.

Finally, I want to tell everyone not to be rigid or nervous in his classes because he is really a great friend. You can talk to him about anything you want (even in Chinese).

I would like to conclude with a phrase that Brandon said to me during our first lesson, which I want to dedicate to all students about to start learning Italian: "Study with courage and serenity." Whatever we do, it's important to stay calm. If we tackle each task step by step, we will eventually become the excellent version of ourselves that we aspire to be.

July 4, 2024

Wang Chunfeng Matteo, Carrara, Italy