Personalised lesson | Full time Native teacher | 10 years of experience | Chinese, English, Italian, Cantonese

Find out more about Felicia

• 1) Do you speak this language fluently because of your origins or because a teacher inspired you to learn?

  Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue. It's the language I grew up speaking at home from a very young age. I also spoke Cantonese with my grandparents, so navigating between two Chinese varieties became completely natural early on. English came through school. Italian, however, has a special story: I started learning it after meeting my husband in Italy. He's Romanian, and that also sparked my curiosity to pick up Romanian, because for me, learning someone's language is one of the most genuine ways to understand their culture and get closer to the people you love.

• 2) Can you name a living, historical or fictional character that you think is the emblematic representative of the language's culture?

  I'd name Gu Ailing, or known internationally as Eileen Gu, the freestyle ski champion who competed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. What makes her so emblematic to me isn't just her athletic brilliance, but the way she bridges two worlds: born in the United States, she chose to represent China and did so with pride, speaking fluent Mandarin in interviews and embracing Chinese culture wholeheartedly. She represents a modern, confident Chinese identity.

• 3) Is there a typical word, phrase, tradition or behaviour in the language that you particularly like?

  One of my favourite things to share with students comes from the 三字经 (Sānzì Jīng), the Three Character Classic, a foundational text of Chinese education dating back centuries. One line I particularly love is:
  
  "勤有功，戏无益"
  "Hard work brings reward; idle play brings none."
  
  What strikes me about this isn't the strictness of the message, but how it reflects the deep Chinese cultural belief that learning is a lifelong commitment. It's something I genuinely carry into my teaching philosophy.

• 4) Why does speaking this language matter to you?

  Chinese is my culture and my roots. It's the language of my earliest memories, my family, and my identity. But beyond the personal, Mandarin is increasingly becoming the language of the world. As China continues to grow as a dominant economic and technological powerhouse, speaking Chinese opens doors that simply weren't there a generation ago, in business, in diplomacy, in innovation.

• 5) What is the main difficulty in learning this language and what can help the process?

  Two things tend to challenge learners the most: tones and characters.
  
  Mandarin has four tones, and the same syllable can mean entirely different things depending on how it's pitched. The most effective way I've found to help students with tones is through massive background listening, immersing yourself in the sounds of the language passively, the way a baby absorbs its mother tongue long before it ever speaks. When tones become a subconscious familiarity rather than a conscious exercise, they start to feel natural.
  
  As for characters, the secret is not to memorise them as whole units, but to break them into components, the radical, which hints at meaning, and the phonetic element, which hints at sound. Once students see the logic inside the characters, what seemed like an impossible wall of symbols becomes a fascinating puzzle.

• 6) Provide a valuable anecdote related to your language learning or your days at school.

  When I first arrived in Italy to meet my husband, I didn't speak a single word of Italian. My only foreign language at the time was English and I made every mistake you can imagine, constantly thinking in English and trying to force it into Italian structures that simply didn't work that way. But that experience gave me something invaluable as a teacher: I know exactly what it feels like to be a true beginner, lost for words in a language that feels completely foreign. I have been there.
  
  It also helped me understand something that I now share with my students: learning a second language is genuinely hard when it's your first leap. But once you've made that leap, once you've rewired your brain to think beyond your mother tongue, each language after that becomes progressively easier. Today, speaking six languages, I can see clearly why someone with only one language struggles so much with their second, while someone who already speaks two or three picks up a new one with surprising speed.
  
  And yes, I still laugh at my early Italian mistakes. Making fun of myself openly in class does something powerful: it tells my students that mistakes are not only normal, they're necessary. The classroom becomes a safe place to be imperfect, and that's exactly where real learning begins.

• 7) How has travel or a specific trip helped you increase your skill and knowledge of the language?

  Travel does something that no classroom can fully replicate, it forces you to communicate with strangers, without the safety net of falling back on English. You find yourself improvising sentences on the spot, listening carefully to how locals actually speak, picking up rhythm and slang that textbooks never teach. Even managing a short exchange, for example asking for directions, ordering food, etc builds a confidence that stays with you.
  
  But beyond language mechanics, traveling to China and Chinese-speaking communities taught me something deeper: culture is the context that makes language alive. You begin to understand why certain phrases exist, why people interact the way they do, and what the language is really trying to say beneath the words. That understanding is something I bring back into every lesson.

• 8) What makes you a Superprof in language?

  I'm a natural polyglot, multilingual since childhood, and that experience has given me something quite rare: the ability to genuinely understand how different languages think. I know why a grammatical concept that seems obvious in Chinese feels alien to an English speaker, or why an Italian student instinctively makes certain errors. Rather than just correcting mistakes, I can explain them in a way that resonates, often in the student's own mother tongue. Speaking multiple languages also makes me deeply aware of how culture shapes behaviour and communication, which means I don't just teach Chinese, I help students understand the world behind the language.