Italian
The teaching of Italian at the Bolyai is almost as old as the change of regime: it appeared among the optional subjects in the autumn of 1990, a year later it…
Italian
About the department
The teaching of Italian at the Bolyai is almost as old as the change of regime: it appeared among the optional subjects in the autumn of 1990, a year later it was offered as a second language, and in 2003 the intensive class started, where it is learnt as the first foreign language.
In the meantime we were invited by two schools in Liguria to take part in a Socrates / Comenius project, and at the same time, as part of cooperation between European regions, the Bolyai's select Italian students travelled with the Mureș County youth delegation to Lecce, in the “heel” of the “boot”. All these were confirming experiences, which year after year were doubled by the participants in the national round of the subject competition at home, some of them later Italian teachers, who held their own in a tough field against competitors who had been learning Italian since their early school years. Thanks to their performance, the town and the school were put on the map of Italian centres in the country, which until then had mostly shown towns larger than ours.
Italian is typically the language that students arriving at the Bolyai in grade IX do not expect, but which they mostly welcome, because it carries elements of contemporary reality that young people value: cars, sport, fashion, cuisine and, not least, industrial design. The nearer and more distant past offer even more solid arguments: from the very first centuries of European culture, Italy has been a great power in music and the home of the fine arts, where forty per cent of the world's art treasures are found, and in modern times, thanks to its outstanding film-makers, one of the most authentic voices of our world's conscience. Drawn by this culture, it has many followers on every continent; far more people speak Italian than its economic and commercial weight would justify, and it has rightly entered the category of the so-called “world languages”. In our region, besides all this, the large number of Italian investors is a reason to learn the language. In addition, Italy's long-established universities offer many scholarships every year under the Erasmus programme, for which Italian-speaking students stand a good chance.
Since Italian is not taught in primary schools in our county, the Italian groups starting at the Bolyai are all beginners, and they reach the level set by the curriculum depending on the number of lessons. At the end of grade XII, students in the advanced groups can write and present a diploma paper, thereby obtaining a certificate of their language competence.