Ciao! I have been teaching Italian for the past sixteen years, privately and at language schools including La Scuola Italiana del Greenwich Village in New York and ItalCultura, the school of the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago.
During our first two lessons, I’ll make sure you have the tools to pronounce and recognize all the sounds of Italian. This step is essential, and it makes everything that comes afterwards much easier.
When I teach, I try to avoid all the things I hated as a language student. My terrifying French teacher in middle school made us repeat the same fake dialogue from a really bad textbook ad nauseam, over and over and over again. Some of it is still carved into my brain: “Bonjour, je m’appelle Richard Drapeau, je viens du Canada, je suis Canadien...”
So we won’t do that.
We’ll use real songs and real literature. We’ll have real conversations, tell stories, improvise, and, when possible, go on “talking walks.” I find that when you engage more of your senses, it becomes easier to relax, stay curious, and actually remember new words.
I customize my materials around your interests, needs, and desired pace. If you love cinema, we can work with films. If you’re interested in literature, politics, food, art, history, or simply being able to have a proper conversation when you’re in Italy, that can become part of the class.
And because you’re learning with a native Italian, you’ll also learn about Italian culture, history, habits, gestures, contradictions, and ways of thinking. Language is never just a pile of grammar rules.
I speak several languages myself, so I know both how exciting and how painfully tedious learning one can be. My aim is to give you a strong foundation without draining all the life out of it.
I hold a degree in Lingue e Letterature Straniere (Foreign Languages and Literatures) from Università Roma Tre and a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago. I wrote my university thesis on translating a long epic poem by W. H. Auden, and at one point I tried to ride a horse across America.
