Francesco's video diary for February: transcript - translation from Italian into English
Hi, this is Francesco here. This is my video diary for February.
The problem was with the bank, because it took me two months and a half to open a bank account, and I don't know why. I went there with the right papers, the right stuff, and every time, it was something different, like, 'Well, we need the paper stating exactly to whom it's addressed,' or, I don't know, just, 'We don't recognise your ID.' Just because, in Italy, we have a paper ID and not a plastic one. And...that was the worst thing that happened to me.
With the flat, I have had no problem, because of the internet - I found it on the internet.
In Italy and here, you have two quite completely different kind of teaching, such as it takes time to get used to one or other, and it's not easy to understand the other one. In Italy, you can be suspended. That means, during the school, you have eight subjects to study. If you fail three, you have to repeat the whole year. And the way of teaching is completely different, because you have much more exercises to do at home. Almost nothing in class, just th teacher telling what he is teaching - nothing else - and you have to learn and write down exercises on your own.
Another example is that here, a lot of the prelims are in English. The text, of course, is in the language you are studying, but the question and the language you use to answer the question is English. In Italy, no. In Italy, we have oral exams, something like eight oral exams during a year, and four written, and you never know when they are, so all the time you have to be ready for exams. Sometimes, you have more, because the teacher just enters the class and says, 'Well, exams.' So, you know, it's kind of different and it's quite hard to get used to a system where the pupils have more time to study and know what they have to prepare, and they can answer in their language. So, in a certain way, it's easier... I mean, it's better because you can really see what they have understood of the text.
Sometimes, you need to use a lot of English to explain things, because, you know, Italian and English are so different from each other that it's not an intermediate... There's no intermediate way to understand it. You just give a word, you give an expression, you give an instruction, and then you have to spend a lot of time talking in English to explain it. Even just because of the grammar order, the grammatical order of the phrase.