Addie Zhang ‘26
If I were to describe SYA in one word, it would be: transformative. Unlike many changes that would usually go unnoticed, I witnessed the small steps that changed me.
When I first arrived in Italy, I was confused. I knew none of the language except phrases like “Ciao” or “Bella” thanks to my sophomore year roommate who kept singing “Bella Ciao” to me when I told her I would go to Italy. Multiply that by 48, and when the whole chaperoned flight arrived at the Rome Airport, we spoke nonstop chatter in English with a few Ciao’s tossed in there. Collectively, as SYA, we deemed this to be broken Italian: choppy.
We started our Italian language learning journey with the teachers explaining that learning a language is like becoming a sponge: the more time and effort we put into refining the concepts we learn in class, the quicker we’d master them, which would fuel our motivation to learn more.
Day by day, Italian class after Italian class, we learned the basics: how to ask to go to the bathroom, order something at a bar (bar is caffe in Italian), or get somewhere via public transportation. Slowly, our “broken” Italian became more fluid, and words started to glide off our tongues. In eight months, we mastered basic grammar concepts like the definite article and verb conjugations. With basic sentence structure and vocabulary, we strung together sentences, and then slowly formed paragraphs. These paragraphs turned into a critical analysis we wrote about an Italian book we read. These stepping stones paved the way for our final destination the capstone.
We were all required to present a 10-minute presentation in Italian for the Capstone project. This was such a magical moment because, after not knowing a single word in Italian, we could now listen to and understand what our classmates were talking about in “la bella lingua.”