During the second semester of our English course we had an exchange with skype with some American students from the Dickinson college. Half of our class, me inclided, was supposed to do the exchange with students from Poznan, but there were some problems and it didn't work, so we all did the exchange with students from Dickinson. As you can imagine there were too much of us and few of them, so not all of us could do skype with the American students all weeks. I think I did skype twice.
However the exchange was nice: we could learn a lot of things about a country which is so distant from us and compare America with Italy. In my opinion it was very useful to speak with an english native speaker, because I had the possibility to do a bit of exercise with my english and I was very satisfied when she understood what I was telling to her. Sometimes it happened that she didn't understand at all, but then I tried to explain with other words what I really meant and so the discussion was comprehensible and successful. When I had to speak in italian I tried to speak more slowly as I could and if she didn't understand I repeated what I wanted to say in clearer and easier words.
What we discussed about wasn't totally new for me; I was very surprised about the ammount of money Americans have to pay for an insurance for health care. In Italy, on the other hand, we have to pay a lot of taxes!!!
During this exchange I hope my english writing, listening and reading is improved, even if I couldn't do much practice because, as I said before, half of our class was more unlucky than the other one. However it was a nice and interensting experience. It would be necessary to do other thousands of experiences like this!!! There are always new things to learn about a foreign language!!!
I envy a bit Americans, because the majority of students after the high school leave home to go to live alone or with a partner for university or for job. I'm not able to leave home and go to live kilometres and kilometres away from home, it dipends from one's personality.
I appreciated a lot the opportunity our teacher Sarah gave us, because we could compare our culture with the culture of the language we are studying and see differences and similarities.
