Hello everybody!

I am Arturo and I come from Italy.

About me

Languages are my passion. Here on Café Talk I am going to share with you the personal method for learning languages that I developed over the years.

I majored in Japanese and minored in Chinese. I still keep studying Japanese because I want to improve it as much as possible. Besides it, I can speak English, Spanish and French fluently. Recently I started learning German and I was able to get the B1 Goethe certificate after just three months. I also started my journey with Croatian as a gateway to other Slavic languages.

In addition to that, a bunch of other languages fascinated me so much that I decided to study them a little bit in order to get a feeling of how they sound and how their structures work. Dutch, Romanian, Turkish, Wolof, Swahili, Yoruba, Rromani are just a few examples.

I have been teaching languages for two years so far, both on the Net and in real life. Recently I became a certified teacher of Italian as foreign language.

So how do I learn languages and what can I teach you?

I think that one the key factors in language learning is awareness. Before learning a foreign language, you need to understand how your mother tongue works. Don’t be scared… You don’t really need to learn difficult linguistics terms and concepts. Nor you need to analyze your first language for months or years before being able to study a second one.

Rather, I can help you discover the differences and the similarities between your mother tongue and your target language in a natural way. Together, we will highlight the points where interference between the two languages is most likely to happen, as well as the points where the similarities can speed up the learning process.

You can apply this key concept to all the components of a language: its sounds, its word structure, its vocabulary. This way you will not only learn a new language easily but also acquire a method to learn whatever other language you want.

Although I am an enthusiast fan of linguistics, or maybe just because of this, I think that the so-called rules of a language can only be discovered, rather than being taught. This is why I won’t teach grammar the traditional way, but I will rather guide you in your journey of discovery.

Once you are aware of what aspects of the language you have to pay attention to, you can become a good listener and a good reader. You will be able to focus on one or more elements, literally absorbing the necessary input and creating a personal mental grammar day by day.

Last but not least, as many successful language learners and polyglots often point out, it is fundamental to start speaking your target language from the very first day. This is what you will do in my lessons. Remember that you first learnt how to speak your mother tongue and it was just a later stage – at school – that you learnt how to write it.

So let’s start learning a new language together!

See you soon here on Café Talk!