Undergraduate student Natasha Nock created a TikTok account to document her process of learning Italian as a Canadian, which has garnered 1.3 million followers. Here she describes how this initiative came to be.
@knocknockwhosthere raga aiutatemi per favore 🤺💀 insta:knock.nockwhosthere #perte #pt #italia #italiani ♬ original sound – Knocknockwhosthere
“When you live in one place for your entire life and within only one culture, you don’t notice as often what makes that culture so remarkable! When I make videos, I’m seeing Italian culture and language through the eyes of a Canadian; Italian people say my videos help them to appreciate their own culture!”
I started studying Italian during my first year of university because I found it very fulfilling to have a new means of communication with an entirely different culture, but halfway through my second year, the pandemic hit, and suddenly I wasn’t able to go to Italian class in person anymore. This made learning Italian pretty challenging, because it can be a difficult language to learn—one that is harder to practice pronouncing outside of an in-person classroom environment.
I had a TikTok account at the time, so I started to make videos in Italian to seek out help from the Italian people with regards to what I was learning. Because I was making videos every day, I absorbed a lot in the process. Now that I have gotten to a point where I am conversationally fluent in Italian, my TikTok platform gives me more opportunities to meet people in Italy. A lot of people want to show me around their cities and want to experience Italy through my perspective! In fact, I just moved to Italy to start a new co-op position!
When you live in one place for your entire life and within only one culture, you don’t notice as often what makes that culture so remarkable! When I make videos, I’m seeing Italian culture and language through the eyes of a Canadian, which is super different to what we experience in Canada; Italian people say my videos help them to appreciate their own culture! Italian people are very proud of their culture and their heritage, and they are always super excited to see a foreigner love Italy just as much as they do!
My advice for anyone who wants to learn a new language is to find topics that interest them and then research how to talk about them in their target language. That way, what you are learning applies to your actual interests that you are likely to communicate about.
