If you want to mortify yourself, look for your high school photos. Ok, maybe you will have a good time laughing, actually. But look at me, I am so funny. I look terrible in photos. Not that I look better in real life, but there are people who are photogenic and come out very well in photos. I am not one of them, and you can see it for yourself, no flower by my ear would help me to improve my appearance. Thank goodness the photo is blurry, so nobody can see me well.
You just won the special prize of seeing another photo, which is not as blurry as the first one. It is from the same high school year.
We were in third grade then. I had my shortest ever haircut in those two years (second and third year of high school), and I think I looked too childish compared to my classmates. Did I have black under my eyes? 👀 As for studying, I was not bad; however, I am here to talk about one subject we had, and it was not my favourite one in the beginning. It was the subject of the Italian language.
In addition to English as the first foreign language, we also had Italian as the second foreign language. That was my first encounter with it, and it was quite difficult for me in the first year. The native tongue of my best friend at the time, who you can see in both pictures right next to me, was Romanian. She was very good from the very first lesson in this subject, though I could not understand why it was so difficult for me.
My grade at the end of the first semester was 3 (out of a maximum of 5). It was the worst grade for me, so I tried a little harder in the next semester. I think the problem was that we started with grammar and some lessons from the required book that I didn't like, and were meaningless to me. How do you learn a foreign language that you have never had any contact with? Certainly not this way...
It was only the English teacher who came up with the trick to make me love Italian. I know, it makes no sense that the English teacher helped with another subject, but it so happened that she decided that we should listen to songs, in English and in Italian, and that way, by singing, we would understand them better. The first song I remember sitting in the classroom and singing along to was Volare.
Volare oh, oh
Cantare oh, oh
Nel blu dipinto di blu
Felice di stare lassù
Who can't sing this part of the song? All of us, I think. And this was not the only song we learned, as we were introduced to Eros Ramazzotti's music too. Well, his songs sounded so cool but the difficulty to sing along was higher. More or less, I could sing the song like this:
la la la la una bella canzone 😂
The other day we heard from the radio this song and yay, I still knew this part la la la la una bella canzone hahaha. Ok, I should get back to this language and refresh my memory a bit, as four years have made me learn something. Not too much to speak Italian, but to vaguely understand it.
A quite new song for me, but not a new song in the world of music, is the next one. I heard it from a radio program one Sunday morning while travelling to my piano gig. I had to find it later at home, and since then, I have listened to it quite a few times. What a nice and beautiful piano part... 💙
The whole radio show was dedicated to Italian songs that I enjoyed listening to while driving. I am bringing just this one here, in addition to the other ones I knew already in high school.
Strange thing, how just the way we are encouraged to learn can make a difference. Learning a foreign language just from the book wasn't tempting at all, but through music, I might have managed to learn something, and of course, improve my grades. 😉
