Anastasiya Lazzaretti
My language journey began 8 years ago when I suddenly got into learning English. I remember I would spend all my free time memorizing lists of vocabulary and studying grammar.
After I got to an intermediate level, I started looking for language partners. During that time, I met a lot of people from different parts of the world and learnt a lot about other cultures.
Many of my language partners were Russian learners. I was always willing to help them with their Russian and derived great pleasure from teaching my native language, which I knew was notoriously difficult to learn.
At the end of high school, I decided to devote my life to languages. I did a four-year degree course in linguistics and started working as a teacher. My teenage love of languages had grown into a career.
During my university years, I realized English wasn’t enough for me and started learning German. After German, I taught myself Portuguese and Chinese.
Recently, I started learning Turkish. I really enjoy the first stages of learning a language. They are always full of surprises and challenges for me.
Anastasiya Lazzaretti
Languages I have studied
English was the first foreign language that I learnt and is the one I use most in my daily life. Although I’ve been speaking English for about 8 years now, I still like to sit down and learn something new once in a while.
While learning English, I met a lot of people from Brazil. They were all very nice and friendly people so I decided to learn more about their language and culture. I can understand pretty much everything in Portuguese and find this language quite straightforward.
I’ve been learning German for a couple of years now and I really like this language. The best thing about knowing German is that I can listen to German songs and understand the lyrics.
Many people tend to find German pronunciation harsh and clumsy but I’m absolutely in love with it.
Chinese is a very challenging language for me and it requires a lot of time and effort. I can already understand and talk about simple subjects in Chinese and I hope I can become fluent in this language in the near future. Chinese culture is fascinating and I dream of visiting China one day.
At the beginning of 2020, I travelled to Istanbul and fell in love with Turkish culture. At the time, I knew only some phrases in Turkish and because of that my trip wasn’t as great as it could be. Now I’m teaching myself the language so I can talk to the locals next time I visit Turkey.
