Business Trip to Naples, Italy

I’ve got a trip coming up this October 6-12, and it’s to Naples, Italy. I’m quite excited about it because I’ve never been to Italy.

The trip is a meeting with some European academics working on a multilingual, international platform for teaching Chinese. I’ve been contributing to the project through the Chinese Grammar Wiki, and this month I’ll finally be able to meet up with the other academics (from Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Germany) and discuss grammar pedagogy and resources. (I’m pretty sure AI is going to come up as well.)

It’s funny, about 16 years ago I was managing a number of “LanguagePod” teams while working at ChinesePod. One of them was ItalianPod, and while I loved that team and the energy and culture they brought to the company, I never really learned much Italian. “Ciao a tutti!” comes to mind.

Now, knowing for a while that I have this trip to Italy coming up, I’ve been studying Italian on Duolingo and using ChatGPT to tutor me in Italian with reference to Spanish (which I have still retained quite a bit of). I’ve been building my own phrasebook and using AI to create audio for that phrasebook. It’s all been a very fun and interesting way of learning Italian quite different from ItalianPod (which, unfortunately, is not so easy to find now). We’ll see how it goes…

If I have any friends in Napoli I’m not aware of, please get in touch!